/lit/ - Literature

This book is unnerving. H.G. Wells just sat down and wrote this behemot of a book within what, 3+ years? Its depth of thought, exploration of humanity, WW1 and speculative dive into possible future is colorful, brilliant and creative beyond anything I've seen from fiction in a long while. This reads excatly like something 40+ years old life-long sci-fi writer would write. Huxley is a damn trout in comparison, not only in writing style, but in the sheer variety ot topics tackled. I know Huxley was described as 'sterile', but damn, it if this was his contemporary then Aldous Huxley must have been a pseud if you juxtapose the two.

Just look at this hilarious fragment about the removal of religions in the new world order (keep in mind this was written in 1933, years before WW2):

>After 2020 there is no record of any schools being open in the world except the Modern State schools. Christianity where it remained sacerdotal and intractable was suppressed, but over large parts of the world it was not so much abolished as watered down to modernity. Everywhere its endowments had vanished in the universal slump; it could find no supply of educated men to sustain its ministry; the majority of its churches stood neglected and empty, and when the great rebuilding of the world began most of them vanished with all the other old edifices that lacked beauty or interest. They were cleared away like dead leaves.

>It might have been supposed that a people [Jews] so widely dispersed would have developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a convenient linking organization for many world purposes, but their special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did nor seemed anxious to attempt. After the World War the orthodox Jews (...) [were] far more preoccupied with a dream called Zionism, the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own in Palestine (...).

>And yet between 1940 and 2.059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed; there was no extermination; there were world-wide pogroms during the political and social breakdown of the famished fifties, but under the Tyranny there was never any specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity and racial egotism in little more than three generations. (...) The world is as full as ever it was of men and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to ‘Israel’.

I don't know whether to see it as hilarious or insightful. Wells had a visible tendency to assume cultures and religions would just vanish, as if no one cared. As weird as this sounds now, remeber this was written 15 years before Israel was founded. This is european-centric to the fullest, without care for other continents except for general thought of 'they just folded and submited.' Fascinating.