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H.G. Wells
Robert Crossley provides a comprehensive examination of Wells's best-known science fiction and fantasy works—and their impact on later writers and thinkers. Complete with Chronology, Primary and Secondary Bibliographies, and Index.
79 pages, Paperback
First published September 30, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 5, 2010
It is a shame that this excellent literary study did not appear soon after it was finished in 1979, though Crossley was allowed by Starmont House to update the bibliography, and his copious annotations reflect the solid background he brought to the project and maintained after its completion. Crossley begins by reviewing Wells' basic profram to construe THE future rather than to imagine future, relying on the Johnsonian prescription to "regulate imagination by reality" while rejecting the Jamesian aesthetic to create, through a rigorous reality, a "house of fiction."
Crossley shows how Wells married T. H. Huxley's Darwinism to a critique of Victorian values in five works written near the year 1900, giving special attention to the prejudices and blind spots of Wells' heroes and narrators. Wells' application of Darwinian thought was sophisticated and uncompromising. In The Time Machine, his Eloi, descended from the Victorian leisure class, now fatten the tables of their erstwhile social inferiors, the Morlocks. Although we might consider this de- not e-volution, nature shows supreme disregard for our characterization of social change. The Island of Dr. Moreau show the other side of the Darwinian coin, the persistence of the bestial in the human, while Wells' other grotesque vision, The Invisible Man, displays the destructive passions still latent in humanity.
In The War of the Worlds, Wells lampooned the blinkered stupidity of colonizers not comprehending that they are themselves being colonized, while The First Men in the Moon stresses the imaginative inertia of both narrators when confronted with a society beyond their experience.
Crossley presents us with a unified view of Wells extrapolative fictions, tying each to the Victorian society which he knew for a certainty slept the sleep of reason , unable in any way to imagine the enormity of change fast closing upon them.
Crossley shows how Wells married T. H. Huxley's Darwinism to a critique of Victorian values in five works written near the year 1900, giving special attention to the prejudices and blind spots of Wells' heroes and narrators. Wells' application of Darwinian thought was sophisticated and uncompromising. In The Time Machine, his Eloi, descended from the Victorian leisure class, now fatten the tables of their erstwhile social inferiors, the Morlocks. Although we might consider this de- not e-volution, nature shows supreme disregard for our characterization of social change. The Island of Dr. Moreau show the other side of the Darwinian coin, the persistence of the bestial in the human, while Wells' other grotesque vision, The Invisible Man, displays the destructive passions still latent in humanity.
In The War of the Worlds, Wells lampooned the blinkered stupidity of colonizers not comprehending that they are themselves being colonized, while The First Men in the Moon stresses the imaginative inertia of both narrators when confronted with a society beyond their experience.
Crossley presents us with a unified view of Wells extrapolative fictions, tying each to the Victorian society which he knew for a certainty slept the sleep of reason , unable in any way to imagine the enormity of change fast closing upon them.
October 23, 2017
Excellent one-volume analysis of Wells' main themes and approaches as exemplified through his major science fiction novels and short stories.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews