Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy

H.G. Wells - inventor of concept of time machine and phrase the shape of things to come - described his life's work as one of critical anticipation. This book unravels complex layers of meaning in The Time Machine, and shows how, throughout his life, he sought to exploit potential of literary and cultural prophecy in new ways. Described by John Middleton Murry as the last of bourgeois Europe, he was its first futurologist. In Shadows of Future, Wells's assumption of prophet's role is related to his championing of modern scientific outlook, and to theory and practice of science fiction and utopian literature. Parrinder explores connections between novelty and repetition, between imagining future and imagining past, and between prophecy and parody as literary modes. Wells's science fiction is reexamined both as a projection of cosmology implicit in writings of Darwin and Huxley, and as a new variation on Romantic and Enlightenment themes of such earlier authors as Blake, Gibbon and Mary Shelley. Later chapters relate Wells's fiction to his nonfiction and look at uneasy relationship of his utopianism to literary prophecy, and at paradoxes inherent in militant internationalism of prophet at large. Finally, Well's influence is traced in a study of antiutopian fictions in Zamayatin and Orwell, and in a broad account of connections between science fiction and scientific outlook down to our time.