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

In Shadows of the Future Wells's assumption of the prophet's role is related to his championship of the modern scientific outlook, and to the theory and practice of science fiction and utopian literature. Professor Parrinder explores the connections between novelty and repetition, between imagining the future and imagining the past, and between prophecy and parody as literary modes. Wells's science fiction is reexamined both as a projection of the cosmology implicit in the writings of Darwin and Huxley, and as a new variation on the 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 the uneasy relationship of his utopianism to literary prophecy, and at the paradoxes inherent in the militant internationalism of the "prophet at large." Finally, Wells's influence is traced in a study of the antiutopian fictions of Zamyatin and Orwell, and in a broad account of the connections between science fiction and the scientific outlook down to our own time.

Patrick Parrinder is Professor of English in the University of Reading and has been Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, McGill University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.