H. G. Wells’s Interwar Utopias: Eugenics, Individuality and the Crowd
Authors
Maxim Shadurski
Abstract
H. G. Wells’s interwar utopian fictions bear witness to a complex cross-fertilization of evolutionary ideas, and debates about individuality and the crowd. Wells devises a World State which provides both eugenic and educational means of human revitalization, and serves as a responsible corrective to the Nietzschean idea of the overman. This article examines 'Men Like Gods' (1923), 'The Shape of Things to Come' (1933), and 'Things to Come' (1935), contending that these utopias reveal a continuing, yet expressly uneasy, centrality of Wells’s national susceptibilities to the emergence of a World State.
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