Can it actually be a utopia without hover-bikes, though?

One of the things I've been doing on holiday is catching up on my classic science fiction reading. (Incidentally, that's science fiction or SF, not sci-fi. Apparently they are very different. I have no wish to rouse the wrath of the world's collected nerds, so I will follow this nomenclature despite having no idea why it should be in place. Isn't social convention wonderful?) This has consisted mainly of reading a huge and chunky compilation of H.G. Wells's novels, Wells being one of those authors who I've always meant to read but have never quite got round to.

The compilation was very entertaining to read - I had no idea that Wells was capable of writing stories that are not only scientifically consistent (for example, if the story calls for time travel to be possible, a suitably hand-wavey explanation for it is concocted, but then every other element of the story remains consistent with the results of this explanation), they're also really well-written and very witty. The Invisible Man, for instance, concentrates very little on the title character, and far more on the people who have to deal with him on a day-to-day basis, giving Wells an excellent opportunity to focus on the absurdity of the events that they perceive. What's more, the stories are frequently applicable beyond themselves - Wells went so far as to explicitly say (in the introduction to the compilation) that he's been "talking in playful parables to a world engaged in destroying itself". Elements of this appear throughout the stories, whether it's in the form of the giant children in The Food of the Gods noting how strange it is that those with money just tend to sneer at those without, rather than helping them, or whether it's the startlingly lucid and cynical passage about the tendency of people to turn on their fellow man if it will help them that appears near the end of The War of the Worlds.

The most obvious place in which this preaching to the audience occurs is In the Days of the Comet, which is little more than a simple presentation of the world as it was when Wells was writing, followed by a presentation of the world as he thought it should be, tied together by a slightly laboured love story. In some places, Wells makes excellent points - his description of the crippling poverty and blatant social injustices suffered by the have-nots of the world is eye-opening, and suddenly makes it rather more obvious why Communism took hold in the popular imagination quite so firmly in the first half of the 20th century. Other aspects are, if not all that believable, at least interesting because of the time at which they were written - his vision of "the swift, smooth train" that he clearly thought would be the result of widespread access to electricity is a very similar concept to the flying car that I thought I'd be driving "in the future" for much of my childhood.

One of the most striking things that Wells does, though, is to change religion as well, in much the same way as it's being changed nowadays by popular opinion. Have a read of this passage, describing the narrator's mother in the new, changed world.

She kept to her queer old eighteenth-century version of religion, too, without a change. She had worn this particular amulet so long it was a part of her. Yet the Change was evident even in that persistence. I said to her one day, 'But do you still believe in that hell of flame, dear mother? You - with your tender heart?'

She vowed she did.

Some theological intricacy made it necessary to her, but still -

She looked thoughtfully at a bank of primulas before her for a time, and then laid her tremulous hand impressively on my arm. 'You know, Willie dear,' she said, as though she was clearing up a childish misunderstanding of mine, 'I don't think anyone will go there. I never did think that...'

Now, although I'd be the first to say that I really hope that Willie's mother is right in this regard, I would never go so far as to label the concept of hell as a "childish misunderstanding". It's far more serious than can be simply brushed away like that, and doing so betrays an underlying attitude that "religion is just what we make it" - an attitude that makes it worse than useless, as it suggests we're all deliberately fooling ourselves. Frank Herbert does something very similar in his classic Dune. From the appendix at the back of the book comes this little gem, placed in the mouths of the "Commission of Ecumenical Translators":

'We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon - the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.'

Not only is this a pretty blatant reworking of the "blind men describing the elephant" metaphor (and it's just as arrogant and internally inconsistent a concept as is that one - claiming that no-one has the single correct revelation is itself a claim to have that kind of revelation), it also instantly writes off religion as being human-created. Just in case Herbert's audience hadn't got the concept, he hammers it home a few paragraphs later by reporting that the Commission's work was said to be "filled with a seductive interest in logic" and that it shouldn't have tried to "stir up curiosity about God". The obvious implication is that the whole edifice of religion is based on irrationality and shouldn't be inspected too closely, lest it come tumbling down.

This is a theme that I'm planning to return to shortly, so I won't keep on at it now. I just think it's worth noting that utopias and "advanced" societies aren't always all they're cracked up to be, and that they seem to have a tendency to insist on humans being the only force that can influence their own destinies. It would be nice to see a little humility in this kind of fiction - if we're going to look at how humans could develop in the future or after a major event, why can't we sometimes accept that we're rather less in control of our own fate than we might like to think?