The Conversation

Brave New World — Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

The most direct literary response to the Wellsian utopia. Huxley takes Wells's premises about scientific management, social stability, and the elimination of suffering to their logical conclusion — and the conclusion is a world in which human beings have been perfected out of everything that made them human. Huxley admired Wells and then realized what Wells was actually proposing.

Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell

George Orwell

Orwell's argument with Wells runs throughout his essays and culminates here. He believed Wells's rationalism had made him incapable of understanding power — that a man who thought evil was simply the result of ignorance and bad organization could not see that some people pursue power for its own sake, and that a world state run by the most rational minds was not a utopia but a tyranny with better press releases.

That Hideous Strength — C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis

The N.I.C.E. is Wells's World State given fictional form: rational, efficient, humane in its stated aims, and demonic in its actual operation. Lewis considered Wells a man of genuine moral seriousness who was wrong at the level of first principles, and this novel is the fullest imaginative argument for why those first principles matter.

Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison

Wells made a man invisible and watched him become a monster. Ellison made a man invisible and found him still fully human. The contrast is the argument. See the full essay: The Theology of Ralph Ellison.

The Shrinking Man — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson

Wells shrank the human person to appetite. Matheson shrank a man to the subatomic and found him still capable of wonder. To God there is no zero. See the full essay: The Theology of Richard Matheson.

The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin took Wells's speculative method and turned it against his assumptions. Her fiction asks what a truly different society would look like — not the rational utopia Wells proposed, but something genuinely alien to all human assumptions, including his. Her answer is more uncomfortable than his, and more honest.

Things to Come

Screenplay: H.G. Wells • Director: William Cameron Menzies

Wells wrote the screenplay himself, adapting his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come. It is the clearest cinematic statement of Wellsian theology: civilization collapses, is rebuilt by rational technocrats, and arrives at a gleaming world state in which the last opponents of progress are literally the people who want to look at the moon rather than conquer it. Wells saw this as triumph. Most viewers find it chilling.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Screenplay: Richard Matheson • Director: Jack Arnold

The film adaptation of Matheson's novel preserves the theological argument of the original. Scott Carey's final monologue — written by Matheson — is among the most theologically serious moments in American science fiction cinema.

The Time Machine

Director: George Pal

George Pal's adaptation of Wells's novel softens the original's pessimism and turns it into adventure. The change is instructive: Hollywood could not accept Wells's own conclusion about what rational progress produces. The Eloi and Morlocks are too close to home.

Heretics — G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

The first serious theological response to Wells, written while they were still friends. Chesterton's argument: the progressive vision is not a liberation from dogma but a substitution of worse dogmas for better ones. Every philosophy has its creed; Wells's creed simply pretended it wasn't one.

The Everlasting Man — G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

Written partly as a direct response to Wells's Outline of History, which Chesterton considered a secular substitute for the biblical narrative. The Everlasting Man argues that the story of humanity cannot be told honestly without Christ at its center — not as a moral teacher but as the hinge on which all of history turns.

The Mind of the Maker — Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers's argument that the Trinitarian structure of creativity is not a pious sentiment but a structural reality — the counter to Wells's assumption that human making is purely material and rational. Creativity images the Creator; it cannot be explained on purely Wellsian terms.

Transhumanism

Various

The intellectual movement that holds that humanity should use technology to transcend its biological limitations — extending life, enhancing cognition, eventually achieving something beyond death. This is Wellsian theology in its purest contemporary form. Wells said death was a problem to be solved by rational means. Transhumanism is the attempt to solve it. The question the Wells Continuum asks: what assumption about human nature does this require, and is that assumption true?

The Eugenics Movement

Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and others — including Wells

Wells was an enthusiastic eugenicist. He believed the improvement of the human stock by selective breeding was not only possible but morally obligatory. The eugenics movement is the most direct historical application of Wellsian assumptions about human perfectibility — and its consequences are the clearest demonstration of what those assumptions produce when given institutional power.

Technocratic Governance

Various

The belief that complex social problems are best solved by technical experts rather than democratic deliberation — that the right people with the right data can manage human society more effectively than the people themselves. This is Wells's World State in bureaucratic form. Every era since Wells has produced its own version: the New Deal brain trust, the European technocracy, the Silicon Valley consensus that software can optimize social outcomes. The argument is always the same. So are the results.

The TED Talk as Secular Sermon

TED Foundation and others

The TED Talk is the contemporary form of Wellsian evangelism: a charismatic expert stands before an audience of the educated and tells them that a specific rational intervention — in education, nutrition, technology, governance, consciousness — will solve the human problem. The format assumes that the problem is solvable, that the solver is a specially qualified expert, and that the audience's role is to receive the solution and implement it. Wells would have recognized it immediately as his own argument in a new medium.