h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The two HG Wells stories definitely worth reading/watching are the Sleeper Awakens, and Things to Come.

The first being a shortish book with a really good moral tale in it, the second being a stupid reaction to Lang's Metropolis which Wells absolutely hated.

Pastey

I find these Fabian Socialist 'works of art' with an ulterior intellectual motive a bit contrived, (a bit like Sartre) though it is true that I have suggested to our daughter that I might be interested if she tracked down some of the detective stories written by G.D.H.Cole and Margaret Postgate, possibly in competition with G.K. Chesterton's "Father Brown".. Their son "Max" was my tutor on the Soviet Economy, and muttered something once in conversation about his parents amusing themselves by writing detective stories, something that I had totally forgotten about until I found myself consulting several of G.D.H's works for what I have been writing.

Cass

A lot of HG's work had ulterior motives, he was that sort of writer. Fritz Lang's Metropolis was a straight out dig at the German nation of the time, showing how their trend towards capitalism and greed would be their ultimate undoing. Whereas Wells' tried to hold the higher moral ground and just totally missed the point thinking that Lang was prophosising the future, something Well's thought only he was capable off. Kinda stupid really.
Lang's Metropolis has become a cult classic that's studied by pretty much every single film student, and a fair few politics students too. And yet Wells' Things To Come, the film he produced directly as a consequence of seeing Metropolis is pretty much resigned to obscurity. And considering how Wells was a household name even then, and continued in fame after his death, and Lang wasn't, well it shows how far better Metropolis was considered to Things To Come.
I guess people don't like to be preached at, and Things To Come is *full* of preaching.

Pastey

Interesting comment-- It has been something of a crusade of mine to try to rescue from obscurity those people within the English-speaking culture who really did try to face up to the challenge of the inter-war period, many of them of course had their doubts as Cambridge Apostles at the turn of the Century. Virginia Stephens/Woolf was something of a satellite to that system, and formed a 'menage a trois' with her brother and Lytton Strachey, who seems to have taken over the role of her teacher-guide from her illustrious father: but it was I believe Leonard Woolf who tried to tackle "The Deluge" and the sweeping away of an existing Civilization and the need for a new one- something of a constant theme of C. Delisle Burns.

Many years ago I was somewhat ashamed when Shirley Williams was on Any Questions from my school hall and remarked on approaching this institution named after Dick Sheppard great leader of the Peace Pledge Union and friend of her mother, Vera Brittain, and the third party of the rather different 'menage a trois' in the Williams house, Winifred Holtby.. I always assume that Shirley Williams must have been Holtby's god-daughter- and that little Shirley got some of her "Yorkshire grit" from her infant years with the striking tall, blonde Viking in their home.

Vera Brittain called them "The Lost Generation"- and we have let those that survived get lost. Even a recent biography of Morgan Forster, for example, more or less losing its way after the publication of "A Passage to India", still the work of a very young man, and showing little interest in his essays and attempts to actively and positively contribute to current affairs as a Cambridge academic.

In fact this came out in the second part of My series of Guide Entries around the death of Mrs. Thatcher, who was born in 1925 just at a time when it looked like things might yet work out OK.. the 'ups and downs' of the inter-war period coming very clearly through Stephen King-Hall's best seller from the Thirties "Our Own Times".. It is "the ships log" of the years 1913-1938 written by Commander King-Hall who had been educated at the Royal Naval College.

But English based thinkers and writers are very much "Prophets in their own country", with the English especially always looking at the grass that is greener on the other side, in part because Continental cultures seem conducive to expansive and "Big" thinking- the result (I suggest) of the Versailles Effect in which thinkers learned to develop the kind of ideas that would favour authoritarian government of one kind or another. As you inferred Revolution either in Russia or in Germany was all about staging a "coup d'etat" and then using the monstrous powers of the State theoretically in order to build a New Society. But power is very seductive and revolutionaries have generally not favoured the Fabian "inevitability of gradualness", therefore the State destroys both Social and Economic life replacing them with its State mechanisms ( as E.F. Schumacher developed in his last book "A Guide for the Perplexed"-- another product of the Rhodes Scholarships).

Cass

Pastey

PS To your comments comparing "Metropolis" and "The Shape of Things to Come"...

" Metropolis" was (I believe) part of the anti-idustrialization/urbanization trend of the post-war era that led to the idea that (as Professor Birnie put it in his 1930 Economic History of Europe) the "terms of trade" had moved against industry and in favour of produce from the Land. I always feel that "Tarka the Otter" is a vivid illustration of this, the author declaring that he just walked out of his London offices c1923 and walked down into Somerset, finally writing this best-seller that very much appealed to the "England my England" passion of the Thirties- very poignantly for me finally Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford"... This was very "Sixties" as was Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".

But the rural dream turned into the nightmare of the elimination of the Kulaks in the USSR and "The Grapes of Wrath" in the USA. Nazism , however, offered to clean up the "Sin City" culture of the 'decadent" cabaret years of German life, modelling Nazi urbanism on Roman morality and German industry on Roman or Romanesque (ie. Teutonic) militarism: but the bedrock of Nazi Germany was the "Heimat" the "garden city" and the small village dream, with the annual Harvest Festival being restored as of central importance.

"The Shape of Things to Come" was written during the Appeasement Years- when the Italians and the Japanese had already shown the face of the 'new-improved" industrial warfare- and then there was Guernica and the full horror of total war, which would not be like the schoolgirl hi-jinks that Winifred Holtby described when her boarding school had to be evacuated when a German battleship shelled it- and she wrote a report in the local press expressing the hope that, should such exciting times come again, she hoped that she would be able to live them once again. Of course H.G. Wells (I believe) had invested heavily in the First Word War losing his son like many fathers- and the whole prospect of another world war to "do it all over again" must have touched him very deeply.

Cass