popular interest in Mars as the abode of life was, because of Schiaparelli's earlier discovery of the "canals," so intense that it at times amounted to a mania. At the same time this interest combines with a fascination for stories of an invasion of England which began, as I. F. Clarke has shown in Voices Prophesying War, with Sir George Chesney's "Battle of Dorking" (1872).... Much more important for our purposes than the story of menace is the second category of Wellsian attack on human complacency, in which Huxleyan cosmic pessimism generates images and ideas central to the twentieth-century anti-utopian tradition. The major works in this "cosmic pessimism" category are The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, When the Sleeper Wakes, "A Story of the Days To Come," and The First Men in the Moon.... SOURCE: Patrick Parrinder, "Utopia and Meta-Utopia in H. G. Wells," in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 12, No. 36, July, 1985, pp. 115-28. SYNOPSIS: [In the following excerpt, Parrinder discusses some elements central to Well's fictional portrayals of utopian or paradisiacal societies.] ARTICLE: In his Experiment in Autobiography Wells includes an apologetic discussion of his dealings with the novel, based on material first assembled together in a folder labelled "Whether I am a Novelist." I should like to believe that somewhere among his papers one might be able to find a comparable folder labelled "Whether I am a Utopian." For though in his lifetime the "Wellsian Utopia" was almost as famous as Freudian psychology or Platonic love, in retrospect Wells's relationship to the utopian mode seems uneasy and paradoxical. He was a major propagandist for utopian ideas who never produced a major utopian book. A Modern Utopia (1905) is the nearest thing in his oeuvre to that book, but it has failed to achieve canonical status either within the utopian genre or within Wells's own corpus; that is, it has been overshadowed by rival utopias such as Ne...
