H.G. Wells is best known for the big ideas—time travel, alien invasions, invisibility—but those are just the surface. Underneath, his fiction is often working through something else: how society functions, and what might happen if it stops.
Even in early novels like The Time Machine, the setup is more than just sci-fi curiosity. The split between the Eloi and the Morlocks isn’t random—it’s a way of thinking about inequality, industry, and what happens when progress loses direction. Wells wasn’t just imagining futures—he was examining the present through different lenses.
That becomes clearer when you read New Worlds for Old (1908), his direct case for socialism. It’s not radical in tone, and it’s not a call to revolution. What he outlines instead is a kind of organised, modern system built on fairness, planning, and collective responsibility. He thought society could run better if it actually tried to.
Wells’ version of socialism was more practical than ideological. He believed in science, education, infrastructure—and fiction as a way to make large ideas digestible. To him, storytelling wasn’t a distraction from real issues. It was a way into them.
Some readers pushed back. Orwell, for example, admired Wells’s early work but criticised what he saw as overconfidence in experts and systems. That tension—between imagination and idealism, between vision and control—is part of what makes Wells still relevant. He didn’t always get it right, but he was asking serious questions.
If you’re interested in seeing where his head was beyond the fiction, New Worlds for Old is a key text. It shows Wells not just as a novelist but as a social thinker—one who thought the future could be designed.
In case you haven’t already guessed, we’ve just added a first edition (early printing) to our shelves…
