A Modern Utopia

Two travellers walking in the Swiss Alps suddenly find themselves on another planet exactly like Earth, except that humanity has organised itself into a single peaceful world state. In a mixture of story and essay, H. G. Wells explores how such a society would work: a world government, freedom of movement, a minimum wage, the end of poverty, and a voluntary order of 'samurai' who govern through discipline and service, while his companion, a botanist, can think only of a woman he once loved.

Wells published the book in 1905, trying to imagine a utopia that is not fixed and perfect but changing and modern. Compare Thomas More's Utopia and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.

He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.