Men Like Gods: the End of Innocence

Abstract

Men Like Gods, written in 1921–2 after Wells had completed his monumental Outline of History, has been largely bypassed by modern academic criticism. Because its apparent tone is one of facile idealism — the novel describes a visit by a group of representative Englishmen and women to a Utopian paradise — it has been bracketed with his other Utopian speculations and dismissed as Wells at his most fanciful. Read as a straightforward text it is difficult to quarrel with this judgement. What has escaped the attention of most critics is that this ‘somewhat dull and undistinguished romance’⁴⁶ is very far from straightforward. In common with The Time Machine and many of his stories it is rich in mythopoeic imagery of direct relevance to the twentieth century and to Wells himself as man and writer.

He had a vague feeling that a very delightful and wonderful dream was slipping from him. He tried to keep on with the dream and not to open his eyes. It was about a great world of beautiful people who had freed themselves from a thousand earthly troubles. But it dissolved and faded from his mind.

(H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods)

At best it is a cry of distress, a plea for things to be other than they are. Men Like Gods is in reality an altogether pessimistic book.

(Anthony West, Principles and Persuasions)