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A Modern Utopia Kindle Edition

by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.0 158 ratings

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Print length

304 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

March 24, 2011
File size

385 KB
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Thomas More
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Lyman Tower Sargent
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004TS8GP0
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 24, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 385 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1542436273

Best Sellers Rank: #17,260 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #7 in Radical Thought
- #9 in Communism & Socialism (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 158 ratings

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H. G. Wells
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The son of a professional cricketer and a lady's maid, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) served apprenticeships as a draper and a chemist's assistant before winning a scholarship to the prestigious Normal School of Science in London. While he is best remembered for his groundbreaking science fiction novels, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells also wrote extensively on politics and social matters and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of his day.
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Michael Valdivielso

Dystopia or Utopia?

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2007

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First off, let me say, I think H.G. Wells is one of the best authors of all time. But when it comes to designing examples of human society he needs help. For example - to keep people employed they are sent to where the labor is needed. They are given just the minimum, shelter and food and clothing, for what is looked at as the minimum of work. In other words, a labor force of wage-slaves, forced to move around the planet at the needs of the factories and businesses. If you HAPPEN to be educated enough or hyperactive enough to do more than the normal amount of work you can gain more or, in the case of women, be allowed to have kids. And if you are really smart, healthy and active you can become Samurai - nobles of the world.
The end results sounds more like a system set up in the Middle Ages, with most of the labor moving to where the jobs are, a small middle class of above normal workers and a class of supermen, and some women, at the top. I am sorry Wells, but this is not a Utopia. Even after talking about individualism and the equality of women in the end this more like a nightmare, and a boring one at that.
You should read it, because many modern books on utopias and dystopias will use it as part of the background on the subject. But I don't think anybody should really talk about it as a serious system of World Government.

14 people found this helpful

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wiredweird

A Utopia for real people

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2007

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In narrative style, this is about the oddest Utopia story I've seen. It alternates almost seamlessly between the usual kind of Utopian fiction and a here-amd-now narrative in a voice that seems to be Wells's own. In the here-and-now, the speaker ponders the human state and reasons closely on an idealized world that still has room in it for fallible, real people. Then the thought gels, and the fantasy world comes to life to play out the points discussed. A companion joins our speaker throughout the story, fact-like and fantastic parts both, and embodies plenty of the human condition that would need to be accomodated: in need of immediate gratification, given more to involuntary emotional reaction than to thinking, and self-centered in a way that's blind, innocent, and pervasive.

As promised in the title, it's modern in ways that many more recent Utopias aren't. Wells considers the unavoidable inequality of child-bearing duties, and turns full-time motherhood into a paying profession. He acknowledges acquisitiveness and cupidity - rather than wide-open warehouses, his Utopia uses money to add wisdom (or at least thought) to the choices made in what to take home. He discusses race and racial superiority in terms that his 1905 audience would have found familiar. In the end, he argues for economic and legal equality not on the grounds of actual equality, a point that he leaves undecided, but on the grounds that no group in history has ever shown that it deserved to hold the upper hand.

There's more, much more, including a wealth of references to other Utopian literature - that by itself might almost have justified the cost of this book. Wells's interleaving of multiple levels of fiction also makes for an unusual reading experience. But it's the ideal world itself that stands out, mostly by not standing out. Real people didn't set out to create a bad world, so most of what we've worked out has a lot going for it. Above all, what we've got has room in it for many kinds of people, not all of whom will or can devote themselves to some moral ideal. "A Modern Utopia" is complex and layered in its presentation, but equally complex in what might look like banality of solutions to pressing social problems. Social improvement mattered too much to Wells for him to let it seem glib or impossible.

-- wiredweird

14 people found this helpful

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Stanley

Fiction meets philosophy

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2017

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Interesting expansion on Plato's Republic. I had mistakenly always thought of Wells as just a pioneer in science fiction, boy was I wrong.

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Maryanne Knight

Dense, but interesting for its time

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2021

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An exposition of H.G. Wells's philosophy, presented as a novel with no plot or action. The most important detail to keep in mind while reading this is that it was published in 1905, before WW I, the rise of Nazism, and the eugenics movement, resulting in certain beliefs about human nature and autocratic states that we now know to be incorrect. While some of his ideals were progressive for the time, such as his views on race and gender equality, others are downright dystopian and horrific. Some of what he envisioned has actually come to pass, in different forms, such as houses connected to each other via the copper wires of the internet instead of the pneumatic tubes of his day.

4 people found this helpful

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MT8

A classic

Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2013

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You can't go wrong with Orwell; I haven't read a story of his I didn't like. It's written in his style and a good starter book for those getting into Utopian science fiction.

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Lauren

Wanted to love it, but no.

Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2014

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I really hated this one. I was dying to read it, because George Orwell cites it as a "childhood favorite" that highly influenced 1984, and I'm a big fan of Orwell's use of language.

But I couldn't get through the first few pages. I found it painful to read. I wanted to love it, but I just didn't. :(

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2015

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Very good read. Purchased for a course. Would purchase from seller again.

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Rob Springer

like a short college course in the history of utopias

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2016

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Wells, like many utopian writers, has no real idea of how to get from where we are to where he would like to see us be. His solution is that the revolution and the power structure that lies beneath this utopia happened at the hands of an altruistic warrior/statesman class. Sadly, for a work that spends much time examining other utopias written before it, this is a crippling defect. But that examination of other utopias is like a short college course in the history of utopias. Other aspects of the society Well's posits are worth the read as well. How he deals with wealth and property, for example, to allow individuals to self-aggrandize but not tip society's scales by passing on this wealth to their progeny balances individual property rights against the needs of the social organism in a way that makes sense even after you put the book down and are no longer under its spell.

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Dianne K.

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2018

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perfect

ronbc

More ancient Greek than modern, but worth reading

Reviewed in Canada on November 22, 2014

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Like much of Wells’s science fiction – The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man and more – A Modern Utopia (1905) is informed by the emerging modern world in which he lived. The mechanization of labour, acceptance of natural selection as the means of evolution, and Malthusian population theory combine with the economics of both free-market capitalism and state socialism to justify Wells’s claim to a “modern” vision of an ideal society.

This is a curious kind of book, which Wells acknowledges at the start. Not quite a novel, not quite an essay, A Modern Utopia is the result of “a peculiar method,” one which Wells believes to be “the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always been my intention in this matter.”

Wells identifies the key ways in which his utopia is meant to be different from the many classical and contemporary utopias to which he frequently refers. A Modern Utopia is to be a dynamic, not static society, one that is not a perfect and unchanging ideal but rather an evolving social organism, adjusting its character to maintain its purposes through changing times and circumstances. In one way or other, Wells’s utopia must account for everyone, not just the able and admirable citizens found in other utopias. It must offer everyone maximum freedom, not maximum uniformity.

A Modern Utopia is a single world state, using modern transportation and communication technologies to make a unified, fluid citizenry possible and practical. This world state is a combination of global socialism — everyone is provided with the means to live in modest comfort — and individual liberty — few restrictions on where or how one lives, on what or how much one works, with incentives for greater industry and for other meaningful contributions to society. Few restrictions, with one crucial exception. Following Malthus, Wells sees unchecked population growth as the greatest danger to society: “a State whose population continues to increase in obedience to unchecked instinct, can progress only from bad to worse.”

In A Modern Utopia, reproduction is strictly regulated, with the goal of improving the species by encouraging the best to have children, while keeping the worst childless: "A mere indiscriminating restriction of the birth-rate … involves not only the cessation of distresses but stagnation, and the minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won at too great a sacrifice. Progress depends on competitive selection, and that we may not escape."

But it is a conceivable and possible thing that this margin of futile struggling, pain and discomfort and death might be reduced to nearly nothing without checking physical and mental evolution, with indeed an acceleration of physical and mental evolution, by preventing the birth of those who would in the unrestricted interplay of natural forces be born to suffer and fail.

The detailed social mechanisms by which Wells proposes to achieve his population ends are beyond the scope of a short review, other than to note that they follow his understanding of Darwinian evolution. Wells would not attempt to engineer “compulsory pairing,” but he would set up conditions and rules that operate to restrict reproduction in ways that foster the “natural selection” of the individuals most fit for the future.

In a society without poverty, with free choice of occupation and interest, a meritocracy of “voluntary noblemen,” called samurai, assume the key leadership and administrative positions. Strictly non-hereditary, this nobility operates something like a combination of Plato’s “Guardians” and the imperial Chinese civil service.

The samurai are “noblemen” thanks to one area in which Wells’s vision doesn’t see the full future. While women in his utopia are free and officially equal, Wells can’t quite bring himself to discard the attitudes of his sex and his time. While he argues that women are inferior to men only because they are kept economically inferior, which he proposes to remediate by making motherhood a paid occupation, his reasons for that economic inferiority are pure Victorian sexism: "It is a fact that almost every point in which a woman differs from a man is an economic disadvantage to her, her incapacity for great stresses of exertion, her frequent liability to slight illnesses, her weaker initiative, her inferior invention and resourcefulness, her relative incapacity for organization and combination …."

So much for an enlightened vision!

On religion, the Utopians have repudiated “original sin,” believing instead that “man, on the whole, is good….This is their cardinal belief.” Individual freedom will reign here as it does in all other aspects of Utopian society: "[T]hey will have escaped the delusive simplification of God that vitiates all terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of an endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the language of Utopia will be a synthesis, even so will its God be."

Too soon, our traveler narrator returns to his own world, where he is over-whelmed by the imperfection of its dirt and noise and unequal suffering. Yet, even here, he sees a hope for the future: "The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student girl, rather carelessly dressed,her books in a carrying-strap, comes across my field of vision. The westward sun of London glows upon her face. She has eyes that dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream." And Wells muses: "After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganized, undiscovered, unsuspected even by themselves, the samurai of Utopia are in this world, the motives that are developed and organized there stir dumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile hearts."

In all, A Modern Utopia is worth the investment of the short time it takes to read, even if its depiction of a world enlightened by science and led by an altruistic intellectual and creative elite strikes me more as a rather naive curiosity than as a prescription for a real future.

But then, a skeptic like Wells may imagine an ideal society, where the pessimist or cynic may not.

One person found this helpful

川流桃桜

最後のユートピア文学

Reviewed in Japan on November 24, 2003

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大ウェルズの数多い著作の中でも、名のみ高くて、今まで完全な形で日本語にされたことのない問題作。一応語り手が友人と共にユートピアに紛れ込んでしまう、と云う形式を取っている為、辛うじて小説とは言えるが、大部分はウェルズの考案したユートピアの詳細な描写に費やされており、思想家、文明構想家としてのウェルズの面目躍如たる夢想の書である。
本書についてはハヤカワ文庫版の『タイム・マシン』の荒俣宏による解説に詳しいが、それによれば、本書はイギリスの小説界に「反ウェルズ闘争としてのSFを発展させた」と云うことになる。個人ではなくして文明単位で物事を考え、「宇宙的悲観論」を展開した本書は、H・ジェイムズやJ・コンラッドと云った異端作家達の絶賛を受け乍らも、それを遥かに上回る反撥を以て後々まで迎えられた。
確かにウェルズの描く、誰しもに番号が振られ、「サムライ」と呼ばれるエリート層による支配が確立し、不健全な嗜好も娯楽も一切存在しない科学(技術)至上主義的なユートピアの姿は、後の世代のディストピア文学群を思い返してみれば、如何に忌み嫌われたかと云うことは容易に想像がつく。だがそれは裏を返せば、彼の描く理想の社会が彼等の知性の琴線に触れてしまったからだとも言える。少なくとも現存するユートピア文学の裡、最も我々に近い感性で書かれた作品が本書ではなかろうか。

8 people found this helpful

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Dr. D. M. Jones

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2014

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Ordering and delivery easy, good. Glad to finally find an old classic at a reasonable price.

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headbaffling

Counteract all the Dystopias out there!