Synopsis

History

First publication: Pall Mall Magazine, serialized June to October 1899

Review

I have been an admirer of Wells since I was very young, but this is the first time I have read A Story of Days to Come. This is part of an attempt to read everything by Wells I can find, starting with the earliest.

“He hated it all, hated even the genial savage who had protected him so generously. The monstrous fraud of civilization glared stark before his eyes; he saw it as a vast lunatic growth, producing a deepening torrent of savagery below, and above ever more flimsy gentility and silly wastefulness.”

Wells had a belief that we are only noble animals, one step away from our bestiality and completely capable of falling back to it. This was definitely the theme of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Further, the division between the working class and the upper class was seen as the difference between our tenuous nobility and our baser feelings. This was exaggerated in The Time Machine, where the beast-like descendants of the working class bred the descendants of the upper class like cattle. Wells saw this division becoming more pronounced in the future. A Story of Days to Come revisits this whole idea. In it Wells specifically foretells the reduction of the middle class, pushing most down into poverty and forcing them to scrape and fight like animals while being slaves to the Company. The middle class has held on for many years after Wells’ days, but now we seem to see exactly what he wrote about coming to pass. The middle class is becoming smaller and crippled with debt. I find it remarkable just how great a grasp Wells had on the forces of society that would shape the modern technological world. Wells wrote about this from different angles in the three different works I mention here. A Story of Days to Come seems to be the one to shake off fantastic metaphors and explain his thinking in more realistic, straightforward terms, actually demonstrating the future he feared would develop. This story seems to get to the point, telling the story of a middle class couple who are forced into poverty and slave-like labor, and the loss of their dignity and nobility in the process. It is especially interesting how he describes the great cities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as the breeding ground for an underworld of violence, foretelling the rise of street gangs and gang culture that we have today. This story seems like the prequel to The Time Machine, telling the story of how civilization starts to devolve toward the future of his earlier story.

I like to think that Wells is being too general in his thinking and that real nobility can exist even among the impoverished. History gives us the lives of certain people who did create great things despite coming from a life of poverty. Yes, we can be pushed backward economically, but I think it is clear that our dignity and nobility are only lost if we let it be lost. We are different from animals because we can make the choice to be noble - or not. For all of his savagery, Blunt does offer Denton his bread and takes time to teach Denton how to survive in the labour class without asking for payment. In this way the poor can prove themselves greater than the privileged classes and more worthy of inheriting our future. And the privileged certainly have the ability to join them in preserving our nobility and making us more than savages. By overcoming our selfishness and greed, and being kind to one another we can stand together and become something greater than what Wells predicted for us. As Wells stated elsewhere, it’s our choice. “All the universe or nothingness, which shall it be?”