Wells., H. G. A modern utopia, New York: Penguin Books, 2005.As two hikers from our world walk through the Swiss Alps, they find themselves transported through time and space to a parallel universe. They come across an assortment of different characters, from a member of the bureaucratic caste that rules this strange world, a factory supervisor, students, small business-people and a host of criminals and social outcasts. Wells uses his characterisations and the narrator's observations to expound his model of a flawed alternative to our world, where many of his own political predilections, from an advance in the status of women, to his disturbing advocacy of eugenics, are given expression.
This book is a must for the student of history interested in the sort of 'utopia' being advocated among the social-democratic left of the early 20th-century (Wells was a prominent Fabian); it also provides dark hints of the sorts of totalitarian politics that Orwell came to so effectively repudiate in his later dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984.
