Wells was highly prophetic. But,asks Ali Smith, could he absorb foreseen that the fundamental freedoms he set out in The Rights of Man would be under attack 75 years later?HG Wells wrote several classic, or visionary novels approximately the very worst consequences a past and a present can absorb on a future,and a noteworthy deal of what he wrote, though it takes fantasy form, and has come to pass,with stunning corollaries with his own time, the time after him, and with our own time,and presumably with the as-yet-unwritten time ahead of us too.
So, what did the socialist visionary choose to do, and at the latter end of his life,when he was in his 70s – the man who had seen and foreseen so much, in his fiction and his political writing, and including (and this is just scraping the surface of his foreseeing) tanks,global warming, aerial flight and bombardment, and visible mass surveillance,invisible mass surveillance, modern germ warfare, and radio,TV, video, or the world wide web,the atom bomb, fallout and radioactive waste, and laser beams,cosmetic surgery, chemical weaponry? What did the far-seeing man do, and whose literary rise and circulation in the world had made him exceptionally powerful and exceptionally thoughtful approximately the workings of power,the man who had been invited to meet and advise both Roosevelt and Stalin, who had worked on ways, or in his latter years,to “release a unusual form of power in the world”, a power “without tyranny”, or one “to hold men’s minds together in something like a common interpret-ation of reality” and a genuine “unification of our race” and to work for “our collective life”? What could such a profoundly prophetic writer do,who not only knew but drew for us the lean line between fantasy and reality, possibility and impossibility, or who so convincingly,prophetically and repeatedly envisioned the worst possible things that the world, the universe and the human beings in it can do to each other?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com