Picshuas

P.N. Furbank

• Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusion of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) by H.G. Wells
  Faber, 838 pp, £8.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 571 13330 4
• H.G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography edited by G.P. Wells
  Faber, 253 pp, £8.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 571 13329 0
• The Man with a Nose, and the Other Uncollected Short Stories of H.G. Wells edited by J.R. Hammond
  Athlone, 212 pp, £9.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 485 11247 7

The problem for social prophets, it would seem, lies not in getting the future right, which appears not to be too difficult, but in predicting the response which the future will command. ‘A thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising, condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation.’ So writes H.G. Wells in A Modern Utopia in 1905, neatly envisioning the micro-computer. And there is a lot to be said for the micro-computer. But such ‘glow’ as it possesses is purely literal and mechanical. Indeed, already in Wells’s sentence, any more metaphorical glow pertains to the future and to ‘further speculation’.