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Monday, February 21, 2022

H.G. Wells' The Time Machine

Wells was a socialist although one of a peculiar kind.  When the Sleeper Awakes is profoundly racist in its animalistic portrayals of Africans and a future socialism the result of one man's hereditary estate gradually taking over the world economy but in a profoundly totalitarian way.  It is a darker, perhaps more realistic vision than Bellamy's Looking Backward on which it and many other similar utopias and dystopias are thefts.

Anyway, what I found interesting is his dark view of the likely effects of a system that he theoretically embraced. The net result of the end of competition and strike is an intellectually inferior, feminized, and incapable human race.

2 comments:

  1. My impression of the Eloi/Morlock society depicted in The Time Machine was that it was supposed to be the result of the class divisions of his time. The pampered upper class would degenerate into effete, helpless parasites, why the working class, denied any opportunity of mental broadening or self-improvement, would degenerate into brutes. Socialism had no part in this.

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  2. You betcha. I even tolerate the astronomy gadgeteering.

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