The Works of H. G. Wells (Atlantic Edition)/Preface to Volume 9
PREFACE TO VOLUME IX
"A Modern Utopia" was an experiment in form. It was done while I was completing "Kipps." The intentions of the experiment I tried to make clear in my preface to the first edition, and from that preface I will repeat here as much as will still interest the patient reader.
The method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless as it seems. I believe it to be the best way to the sort of lucid vagueness which has been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily to what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no, because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any levity or humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refuses attention. Mentally he seems to be built up upon an invincible assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two, he deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not to attempt to please here. Even if I presented all my triclinic crystals as systems of cubes—! Indeed I felt it would not be worth doing. But having rejected the "serious" essay as a form, I was still greatly exercised, I spent some vacillating months over the scheme of this book. I first tried a recognised method of viewing questions from divergent points that has always attracted me but which I have never succeeded in using, the discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr. Mallock's) development of the ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me with unnecessary characters and the inevitable complication of intrigue among them, and I abandoned it. After that I tried to cast the thing into a shape resembling a little the double personality of Boswell's Johnson, a sort of interplay between monologue and commentator; but that too, although it got nearer to the quality I sought, finally failed. Then I hesitated over what one might call "hard narrative." It will be evident to the experienced reader that by omitting certain speculative and metaphysical elements and by elaborating incident, this book might have been reduced to a straightforward story. But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion. I do not see why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for stark stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order to make it clear to the reader that, however queer this book appears at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial and deliberation; it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughout at a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other.
So much for the intention of the book. It had a certain moderate success in both Europe and America, and later on a cheap edition had a considerable sale in Great Britain.
Bound up with it here is a paper called "Scepticism of the Instrument," which was read to the Oxford Philosophical Society on November 8th, 1903, and which enlarged upon and cleared up various issues raised in "A Modern Utopia." Following upon that are several papers of unequal merit and various interest that it seems just worth while to reprint in a collected edition of the writer's work.