Men Like Gods

Abstract

Between the writing of The World Set Free and the publication of Men Like Gods there was a gap of ten years, a decade in which Wells was intensely preoccupied with the huge issues of the war and reconstruction. The writing of Men Like Gods in 1921–2 marks a return not only to the romance as a literary genre but to his earliest imaginative reveries. When reading Plato’s Republic as a boy at Up Park Wells’s mind had been filled with ‘the amazing and heartening suggestion that the whole fabric of law, custom and worship, which seemed so invincibly established, might be cast into the melting pot and made anew’.²² From that time onward the idea of a complete recasting of human life was never far from him and he delighted in presenting novel ways of living to his readers. In ‘Another Basis for Life’ (1894) he even speculated on the possibility of a totally different atomic basis for living matter, and time and again—in Anticipations, In the Days of the Comet, The World Set Free and a score of later works—contrasted the world which could be with the squalid world he knew. The contrast was attempted principally to act as a stimulus towards social change. In certain moods life in the first half of the twentieth century impressed him as almost intolerable.