TonoBungay Herbert George Wells 9781294140542 Books
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TonoBungay Herbert George Wells 9781294140542 Books
Wells, like many utopian writers, has no real idea of how to get from where we are to where he would like to see us be. His solution is that the revolution and the power structure that lies beneath this utopia happened at the hands of an altruistic warrior/statesman class. Sadly, for a work that spends much time examining other utopias written before it, this is a crippling defect. But that examination of other utopias is like a short college course in the history of utopias. Other aspects of the society Well's posits are worth the read as well. How he deals with wealth and property, for example, to allow individuals to self-aggrandize but not tip society's scales by passing on this wealth to their progeny balances individual property rights against the needs of the social organism in a way that makes sense even after you put the book down and are no longer under its spell.Product details
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Tags : Tono-Bungay [Herbert George Wells] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages,Herbert George Wells,Tono-Bungay,Nabu Press,129414054X,Fiction - General,Fiction General,General,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
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TonoBungay Herbert George Wells 9781294140542 Books Reviews
Nothing like HG Wells and his Utopian dreams. This is almost a tongue in cheek view of a modern utopia in his mind.
Not his best work, but an interesting look into what this pop writer and serious thinker in the first half of the last dreadful century thought about a "perfect" society.
Interesting expansion on Plato's Republic. I had mistakenly always thought of Wells as just a pioneer in science fiction, boy was I wrong.
This isn't the best thing Wells wrote. Little character development. Of interest mainly to those interested in utopian novels.
Plato and Ayn Rand have their Utopias and did many other philosophers including Karl Marx. Buy this book and you'll see so many parallels to Orwell and Aldous Huxley and yes, of course Jack London's masterwork The Iron Heel.
First off, let me say, I think H.G. Wells is one of the best authors of all time. But when it comes to designing examples of human society he needs help. For example - to keep people employed they are sent to where the labor is needed. They are given just the minimum, shelter and food and clothing, for what is looked at as the minimum of work. In other words, a labor force of wage-slaves, forced to move around the planet at the needs of the factories and businesses. If you HAPPEN to be educated enough or hyperactive enough to do more than the normal amount of work you can gain more or, in the case of women, be allowed to have kids. And if you are really smart, healthy and active you can become Samurai - nobles of the world.
The end results sounds more like a system set up in the Middle Ages, with most of the labor moving to where the jobs are, a small middle class of above normal workers and a class of supermen, and some women, at the top. I am sorry Wells, but this is not a Utopia. Even after talking about individualism and the equality of women in the end this more like a nightmare, and a boring one at that.
You should read it, because many modern books on utopias and dystopias will use it as part of the background on the subject. But I don't think anybody should really talk about it as a serious system of World Government.
In narrative style, this is about the oddest Utopia story I've seen. It alternates almost seamlessly between the usual kind of Utopian fiction and a here-amd-now narrative in a voice that seems to be Wells's own. In the here-and-now, the speaker ponders the human state and reasons closely on an idealized world that still has room in it for fallible, real people. Then the thought gels, and the fantasy world comes to life to play out the points discussed. A companion joins our speaker throughout the story, fact-like and fantastic parts both, and embodies plenty of the human condition that would need to be accomodated in need of immediate gratification, given more to involuntary emotional reaction than to thinking, and self-centered in a way that's blind, innocent, and pervasive.
As promised in the title, it's modern in ways that many more recent Utopias aren't. Wells considers the unavoidable inequality of child-bearing duties, and turns full-time motherhood into a paying profession. He acknowledges acquisitiveness and cupidity - rather than wide-open warehouses, his Utopia uses money to add wisdom (or at least thought) to the choices made in what to take home. He discusses race and racial superiority in terms that his 1905 audience would have found familiar. In the end, he argues for economic and legal equality not on the grounds of actual equality, a point that he leaves undecided, but on the grounds that no group in history has ever shown that it deserved to hold the upper hand.
There's more, much more, including a wealth of references to other Utopian literature - that by itself might almost have justified the cost of this book. Wells's interleaving of multiple levels of fiction also makes for an unusual reading experience. But it's the ideal world itself that stands out, mostly by not standing out. Real people didn't set out to create a bad world, so most of what we've worked out has a lot going for it. Above all, what we've got has room in it for many kinds of people, not all of whom will or can devote themselves to some moral ideal. "A Modern Utopia" is complex and layered in its presentation, but equally complex in what might look like banality of solutions to pressing social problems. Social improvement mattered too much to Wells for him to let it seem glib or impossible.
-- wiredweird
Wells, like many utopian writers, has no real idea of how to get from where we are to where he would like to see us be. His solution is that the revolution and the power structure that lies beneath this utopia happened at the hands of an altruistic warrior/statesman class. Sadly, for a work that spends much time examining other utopias written before it, this is a crippling defect. But that examination of other utopias is like a short college course in the history of utopias. Other aspects of the society Well's posits are worth the read as well. How he deals with wealth and property, for example, to allow individuals to self-aggrandize but not tip society's scales by passing on this wealth to their progeny balances individual property rights against the needs of the social organism in a way that makes sense even after you put the book down and are no longer under its spell.
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