Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century

BOOK REVIEW

Reviewed by Seamus Flaherty

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books | November 20, 2020

In Sarah Cole’s estimation, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) – ‘fiction writer, social commentator, political aggravator, all-round prognosticator, and worldwide educator’ – was ‘one of the greatest and most innovative writers’ of the twentieth century (12, 320). Whatever one thinks of Cole’s assessment what certainly cannot be denied is the sheer scale of Wells’ literary ambition. As Cole neatly puts it, Wells ‘wrote of and for a future that he believed his writing could usher into being’ (1). Inventing Tomorrow is, in comparison, remarkably modest in what it sets out to achieve. However, by almost any other standard, Cole’s aspirations in the book are far from humble. On the one hand, Inventing Tomorrow attempts ‘to rewrite the literary history of the twentieth century in England’; on the other, it seeks ‘to suggest proliferating possibilities for how literature might interact with the world’ (1). The book, then, is at once both vastly bigger than Wells, addressing the broader history of modernism and the important question of what literature can and should do, and centrally about Wells, who provided ‘a path that literary culture chose not to take’ – a path that Cole, in contrast to most literary scholars, fervently but critically endorses (2). Cole’s book is both monograph and manifesto.