Yarns Without Threads - H G Wells

H G Wells

	Men Like Gods

First published by Cassel & Co Ltd, 1923. Sphere paperback published 1976.

Some science fiction stories of H G Wells are so well known that they tend to be classified as popular classics, rather than SF. The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Time Machine have been the subject of numerous adaptations for small and large screen, the radio, and even the stage. Perhaps one reason for this is that Wells is usually vague about technology. The reader is simply presented with a machine, chemical or apparatus - any underlying concepts tend to be ignored. This gives free rein to the imaginations of the props department - sadly this often doesn't take them very far.

Wells was essentially a futurist and polemicist. He didn't like many aspects of the world in which he lived, and had various ideas about how it should be improved. This can produce delightful stories, such as The History Of Mr Polly, but it can also lead to slabs of propagandising oratory, as it does in Men Like Gods. A disparate group of Edwardians are unintentionally transported into a parallel universe, which is very like the current Earth, but several millenia beyond its equivalent of the Industrial Revolution. A succession of planet-wide social and economic upheavals - the last "Age Of Confusion" - has given way to what the visitors dub Utopia. Everything Wells finds ugly or undesirable has been eliminated or bred out - illness, mice, indolence, wasps, disability, weeds, religion, conurbations, etc. Today, publishing a mass-market novel which lauds the application of eugenics might be impossible - but in the aftermath of the Great War, and with another huge conflict seeming only too likely, suggesting that all babies should be perfect (and economically supportable) in a society dedicated to education, fulfilment and research did not have Nazi connotations.

book cover As in The Dream, which relates the experiences of some far-future inhabitants of southern England, nudity is the norm for the inhabitants of Utopia. Wells appears to regard clothing as so obviously redundant that its lack is hardly mentioned or discussed - I struggled to put together extracts illustrating Utopian's social nudity and its impact on the visitors. The weather clearly helps, as it is uniformly warm and dry. Interestingly, most older Utopians are clothed. This seems to indicate an early version of the cult of the body beautiful - the tall, beautiful, slim, strong and golden-brown bodies have no covering, just some jewellery, but wrinkles and bulges must be kept out of sight. (An aspect of Utopian eugenics is that racial purity is highly regarded - while inter-racial relationships are not unusual, mixed-race conceptions are unknown, and all the Utopians encountered in the book are clearly Caucasian.)

While I found some aspects of Men Like Gods intriguing, ultimately there was far too little in the way of a story to hold my attention. Perhaps a world peopled entirely by a slightly smug middle class was ultimately too much for me. I also found the removal of huge swathes of biological diversity, while retaining a viable ecology, totally unconvincing. So I can't rate the book very highly. Eric Frank Russell's naturist planet is much more fun, and has much more to say about social nudity and the attitudes of textiles. Despite the near-continuous presence of naked people, I can't give Men Like Gods top marks for either nudity or naturist nudity, since so few of its 232 pages actually deal with these aspects of Utopia. But it is probably worth trying the book if you come across it, if only for some interesting concepts which were probably truly novel for 1923. The full book is available online as plain text through Project Gutenberg, or in formatted Webpages. This book may be the first account of parallel universes stacked "like pages in a book" in some higher dimension. Utopia also has an Internet, used for a global voice-mail messaging and tracking system. If only Wells had been a bit more original in crafting his Utopian society, rather than merely picking and choosing what he thought of as the best bits of his own political credo, this could have been a fantastic book, rather than a somewhat disappointing fantasy.

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2003 December 21.

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