Do H.G. Wells's books stand the test of time?

[Toby Frost]

If I remember rightly, Moreau is clearly a racist, and at one point claims to have made a black man from a gorilla. He stands somewhere between a Victorian colonial overlord and a fascist, as he tries to "better" the servants he creates and beat religion into them, but also sees himself as a biologically superior creature. My suspicion is that he is a mixture of traits that Wells disliked. The only truly human characters are three white Europeans, but I don't think there's an argument there, as the satire is clearly aimed at them, and (grotesque as they are) the beast-people are secondary in that regard.

I don't know the real answer, perhaps there is someone with more info on the matter, it seems less clear cut than at first glance.

My suspicion is that a lot of people that we regard as "progressive" for their time were actually weirder and more nuanced that we think, and don't slot neatly into the fixed scale that we have these days. A lot of pseudo-science was knocking around in the late Victorian times, some of it very harmful and some of it just nonsense. Conan Doyle was taken in by the Cottingley Fairies, after all.

 

[Venusian Broon]

My suspicion is that a lot of people that we regard as "progressive" for their time were actually weirder and more nuanced that we think, and don't slot neatly into the fixed scale that we have these days. A lot of pseudo-science was knocking around in the late Victorian times, some of it very harmful and some of it just nonsense. Conan Doyle was taken in by the Cottingley Fairies, after all.

There is that indeed. For example, I believe that he came to regret his early attitudes to the Jews and apologised for them publically later in life.

One must also be careful in attributing singular issues to his novels. The War of the Worlds is not just about reverse-colonism, it was also a subversion of the wildly popular, at the turn of the century, 'Invasion England' novels where authors would construct scenarios where the dastardly German/French/Johnny Foreigners would invade the sceptred isle.

 

[olive]

My suspicion is that a lot of people that we regard as "progressive" for their time were actually weirder and more nuanced that we think, and don't slot neatly into the fixed scale that we have these days.

This. After all, if there wasn't a difference, not being able to move an inch in more than over a century would be sad -besides being improbable- for humanity today.

Nevertheless, this new trend of digging up quotes from letters, texts of old writers and artists...etc. to find 'racist' or 'sexist' remarks have various different underlying causes and motivations in my opinion. It looks like an attempt of reducing these people and their work to some series of manufactured objects designed for different groups of people in some Needful Things Walmart chain. A short time ago, it was Mark Twain if memory serves right.

I'm just curious how far this separation or division - I don't know what to call it- is going to go. My English ended a paragraph ago. So just to give it a try, if we look at writers as a part of centripetal forces vs centrifugal forces in human history, it's pretty safe to say H. G. Wells stood the test of time.

But then, I'll claim that it is also safe to say this for most of the long-dead writers people still read and write about today and fill threads in forums. Maybe the actual point is the wholesale?

 

[olive]

Sorry, repeat. I don't know what happened.

 

[Toby Frost]

Part of the problem, I think, is that we now have packages of views that we would lump together as "progressive" or "conservative" that these people wouldn't have done. I remember reading that Jack London considered himself a Socialist, but held a range of views that even a Socialist 20 years later would have considered cranky or downright wrong. And, especially on the internet, a lot of people refuse to accept that someone who agrees with them 70% of the time isn't an enemy, but an ally.

 

[olive]

Agreed. Paraphrasing Peter Burke, that's because certain 'categories are dissolving and they actually tell more about the times they were invented than the times they are supposed to refer.'

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

I don't know the passage in question -no time at the moment- but the 'understanding' of racism in Wells' time, its expression in daily life, and text would be very different than how we understand it today in the 21st century, don't you think? Of course, we could go and say 'Racism is racism at every point in history, no excuse, nothing's out!' but that would be stating an ideal, nothing more.

Xenophobia is not a 21st century invention, it actually existed in Wells' time. But can you imagine traveling back in time and trying to explain the hyper-modern understanding of xenophobia to Wells?

I agree, what Wells meant when he described himself as "a racist" is probably not the same as what we would usually mean by "a racist" today. But what DID he mean? I suspect that in "Moreau" he was, in part, writing about his own conflicting, in fact incompatible, views on "race", colonialism and "the white man's burden".
Wells and Kipling were contemporaries and both very popular authors, I think both were influential (Kipling more so) on the culture of their time and both good enough to be still widely read today. Losing my thread here...

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

Part of the problem, I think, is that we now have packages of views that we would lump together as "progressive" or "conservative" that these people wouldn't have done. I remember reading that Jack London considered himself a Socialist, but held a range of views that even a Socialist 20 years later would have considered cranky or downright wrong. And, especially on the internet, a lot of people refuse to accept that someone who agrees with them 70% of the time isn't an enemy, but an ally.

Mmm. I agree with you 70%...
But what if the other 30% is something like, "and the global banking system is controlled by THEM"?
I don't believe in ideological purity but you can't make allies of people with poisonous views - eg the Nazi party portrayed themselves as an anti-capitalist, socialist movement.

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

In reply to all the above on HG Wells and racism, I'm glad to know his opinions matured, he is one of my all-time favourite authors, mainly for Moreau, the short stories and The Time Machine. Favourite short story: The Truth About Pyecraft

 

[BigBadBob141]

Favorite short stories: "The land ironclad" ( first tank story before tanks were even thought of), "The country of the blind" (things are never quite as straight forwards as you would think), "The flowering of the strange orchid" (good horror story), "The door in the wall" (one of those strange you only get this chance once in life stories), will have to dig out my book (got it for my fourteenth birthday) to see if I can find any others worth a mention!

 

[Ursa major]

The book is written as a report from a single narrator. It was a modern approach at the time

I read The Prisoner of Zenda a couple of years ago. The book's first person narration was not something I'd been expecting from a 1894 novel.

 

[Foxbat]

I still read Wells and still love his work. You have to make allowances for modern eyes but it's still good stuff to me

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Me also.

 

[Guttersnipe]

What will humanity be like in the far future? Will we ever meet extraterrestrials? Could someone be made to be invisible? These are questions we have been asking long before Wells's stories. The ideas are timeless. Of course, the scope of these phenomena in his works are dated. It's up to the readership to adapt it according to their culture.