Description
Book SynopsisH.G. Wells has been branded as a novelist who betrayed his vocation. But Wells saw himself as what we would today call a public intellectual. How credible is this claim? And what happens when we look at him in this way? So typecast has Wells’s reputation become that neither of these questions has been previously asked, but when we look at Wells as a thinker we find a whole new quality to his later works, which have invariably been dismissed by literary scholars as of low quality or even not worth reading. In particular, Wells’s prescience as a prophet of our current environmental problems stands out - for example, he foresaw anthropogenic climate change as early as 1931. Popular conceptions of Wells as racist, imperialist and eugenicist are also challenged. What emerges is a new perspective on a significant public intellectual and- pioneering prophet of the twenty-first century.
Table of ContentsForeword by Patrick Parrinder
Introduction: H.G. Wells, the Disorderly Prophet
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Wells as Some Sort of Philosopher
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Days of Future Past: Wells as Historian and Prophet
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Should Wells Be Cancelled?
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The Dream of Cosmopolis: Wells and Politics
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God, Science and Mr Wells
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Wells and Human Ecology
Appendix I: The Philosophical Works of H.G. Wells
Appendix II: The Prophecies of H.G. Wells
