As a prolific writer and prophet of optimism and progress, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) played a crucial role in the history of utopian fiction. After a few stories which expressed his endeavor to wake up humanity and draw attention to the dangers ahead of us, including the disaster of increasing class conflict and the astronomical catastrophe of an earth inevitably cooling off, he projected different fictional blueprints of a world state unencumbered by a history of revolution. His attempts to revitalize the utopian tradition attracted not only a wide readership but also the interest of state leaders. Single-handedly he appeared to offer an alternative to Marxist revolution, Communist ideals, and Fascist politics. In the 1920s and later, however, he clearly overplayed his hand and was blamed for being naive. Nevertheless, his keen interest in scientific and technological innovation as well as his involvement in contemporary political developments made his work preeminently modern. Undoubtedly a man of high intelligence, his weakness was that he wanted too much and too soon. By the time of World War II, he had forfeited almost all credit that he had enjoyed at the turn of the century. He explicitly situated himself in the tradition of utopian writing and must have deplored the strong anti-utopian reactions triggered by his work. The dystopian narratives by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell were a critical response to Wells’s eutopian fiction as well as to current sociopolitical developments.

Still, dystopian themes and situations occurred in Wells’s early fiction too, notably in The Time Machine (1895) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). The Time Machine postulates a fourth dimension along which it is possible to travel by means of a vehicle designed by the time traveler. He finds that, more than eight hundred thousand years from now, mankind has evolved into two species, the Eloi, frail little creatures with the intellect of a child who live above ground, and the ape-like Morlocks, who live in a subterranean world. The Eloi, who in a somewhat different role occur also in Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île, live their decadent life in a quasi-paradisiacal landscape. Unchallenged by competitors and pampered by utopian conditions, they have lost the vigor and energy they once had.