Wells & Prophecy

BOOK REVIEWS and death—giving Gissing time to recover from a serious bout of influenza and pleurisy—they carry out this "marriage" in May 1899, with Gabrielle's widowed mother in attendance. Gissing moves into the Fleurys' Paris apartment and works with new confidence on By the Ionian Sea, short stories, an anti-war article, and a new novel. October sees the belated publication of The Crown of Life, in which the hero, after a long trial, attains the love alluded to in the title. Gissing, similarly rewarded, feels that he can face the new year and new century with better grounds for hope than he has had for many years. Martha S. Vogeler California State University, Fullerton Wells & Prophecy Patrick Parrinder. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. xi + 170 pp. Cloth $34.85 Paper $16.95 FIFTY YEARS after his death the importance of H. G. Wells remains at issue. Wells lurks outside most modern readers' experience, recognized only distantly, along with Jules Verne, as the inventor of science fiction, and remembered somehow—most people would be hardpressed to say exactly how—as active around the turn of the century. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a Wells revival of sorts, and since then the publication of a thin but steady stream of short, booklength surveys of his work, a new biography, some significant editions of some early novels, and the reissuing of many of his out-of-print novels have prevented Wells from disappearing from critical view altogether. But there has been little effort recently to ask the hard questions about Wells's significance. Patrick Parrinder's new book is the first in more than a decade to raise the issues of what distinguishes Wells and why he might be important. Parrinder beards the lion in his den: he argues that what distinguishes Wells is the aspect of "prophecy," a special sense of the importance , whether as a source of hope or of despair, of the future as an intrinsic aspect of the present. In his opening chapter Parrinder surveys, somewhat ambiguously, the range of prophetic modes. His sense of the tradition is essentially literary, taking no account of such classic meditations on prophecy as Bertrand de Jouvenel's The Art of Conjecture and Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism. The second chapter's sketch of Wells's own various positions about prophecy does not clarify the 351 ELT 39:3 1996 central issue. At one point Parrinder finds it useful to follow one of Wells's own schemes, put forth in The Future in America (1906), of five phases of the prophetic mind. Out of these broad and casual surveys we conclude that literal "forecasting" is not the point. The mode Parrinder identifies as most consistently Wellsian anticipates the future while always remaining aware of the parodie possibilities of the vision. This is a beginning, though anyone familiar with recent discussions of Wells's style will not find it surprising. After the opening two chapters on prophecy, the book surveys Wells's work in terms of five broad categories: "space and time" (Chapter 3), humankind's "Dethronement" by Darwinian ideas (Chapter 4), the sense of civilization's collapse (Chapter 5), the possibilities of renewal (Chapter 6), and utopia (Chapter 7). Here Parrinder's thorough acquaintance with everything Wellsian stands him in good stead, and if the theoretical frame may be loose and baggy, there are many moments of fine individual insight. He is especially alert to how the state of Wells's health shapes his outlook for civilization. The book ends with two chapters on "Wells's Legacy," tracing his influence, first on Zamyatin and Orwell, and then on a scattered group of writers from J. D. Bernai to Asimov, Ballard, and Dick. These two chapters, like some of the earlier ones, were first published in somewhat different form more than a decade ago. They have been modestly rewritten and some up-to-date references have been added, but they do not engage other critics, and they are oblivious to current literary debates. The genial thoughts about the courses of optimism and pessimism...