Simon Hawke: The Dracula Caper

"Oh, come on," Delaney said. "Wells wasn't talking about that kind of world state. He dreamed about a race of supermen, a sort of modern Samurai, but he wasn't talking about anything like Hitler's master race. His modern Samurai was an analogy for the type of people we are, educated and technologically sophisticated citizens of a democratic society. He foresaw a great deal of what actually did happen, a shrinking world, growing interdependence based on technology. He wrote about it in When the Sleeper Awakes, imagining a world in which everything was bigger and more crowded, there was more air transportation, more diversified and bigger economic speculation. He wrote about the future in A Story of Days to Come and A Dream of Armageddon and Anticipations. That 'teatime socialist,' as you call him, that young man who seems so happy right now to have found the secret of writing hack journalism successfully. later saw the future almost as clearly as if he had traveled there himself. Doesn't that make you wonder?"

"Maybe it would if he was a bit more accurate in his predictions," Steiger said. "That socialist 'world state' he was dreaming of, for example. It never did happen."

"Didn't it?" Delaney said. "To someone from this time period, our society might look a great deal like a socialist world state. In his autobiography, Wells wrote that one of the things he wanted most was to see a new form of education, particularly new ways of teaching old subjects. He was the first to envision something he called the subject of Human Ecology, where history wasn't taught from a perspective of memorizing useless facts and dates. but from an analytical standpoint, making it relevant to social movement. As he put it, "the end of all intelligent analysis is to clear the way for synthesis." He felt that only a sound analysis of history could bring it into context with current affairs and enable the forecasting of probable developments. As he put it; looking at life not as a system of consequences, but as a system of constructive effort. He was talking about Futurism, Creed, a field that didn't even begin to come into its own until the late 20th century! He was one of the first writers to recognize that there would be a change brought about in human relationships and human endeavors by increased facilities of communication. When McLuhan said the same thing in the 1960s, everybody thought it was an incredibly original insight, Because he called himself a socialist, Wells has been misjudged by history, criticized as being naive. In fact, he was among the first of the so-called socialists to attack Marxism, because he believed that it was based on a medieval approach, ignoring the use of scientific imagination.

"Look at the world he came from," Delaney said, gesturing outside the coach window. "A society built around a rigid class structure, the beginnings of industrialization in a world where illiteracy was the rule rather than the exception. People in this society were criticized when they tried to rise above their class, their 'station' in life. Wells realized that an industrial society built on a class system would have to wind up exploiting an uneducated working class. In this time period, the only visible alternative to that was socialism Phis was a time of labor demonstrations and riots. Wells was responding to the temper of the times. He didn't sec how the system of weekly wages employment could change into a method of salary and pension without some son of national plan of social development. Socialism seemed to offer an answer."

"Share the wealth," said Steiger sarcastically. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, is that it? Christ, Finn, don't tell me you're seriously defending that kind of thinking!"

"I'm not. That was the Marxist line. But strictly speaking, labor unions are a socialist concept. Forget the word 'socialist' for a moment. Wells said, 'So long as you suffer any man to call himself your shepherd, sooner or later you will find a crook around your ankle.' Wells looked at America and said. 'The problem of personal freedom is not to be solved by economic fragmentation; the Western fanner last his independence long since and became the grower of a single special crop, the small shopkeeper either a chain-store minder or a dealer in branded goods, and the small entrepreneur a gambler with his savings and a certain bankrupt in the end.' Are those the words of a Communist or are they the words of someone who already saw the trend towards multinationals?"

"I hadn't realized you were such an authority on Wells," said Steiger. "You're quoting stuff that wasn't in the mission programming tapes. You couldn't have had time to bone up on his writings just to prepare for this assignment. Why the intense interest?"

"Because it all started with temporal physics. I've never fully understood 'zcn physics' and anything that Ican't understand tends to drive me crazy," said Delaney.

"Hell, temporal physics drives everybody crazy," Steiger said. "There can't be more than a handful of people who've even got a grip on it. But…what does that have to do with H. G. Wells?"

"The idea of temporal physics first appeared in science fiction." said Delaney. "and Wells was one of the lint to write what we now know as science fiction. He admitted that he didn't really understand physics, yet in some of his early essays. he was grasping at the same ideas scientists such as Planck and Bohr and

Einstein grappled with. In that essay he mentioned to us so casually. 'The Universe Rigid.' he tried to explore the idea of a four-dimensional frame for physical phenomena. Ile tried to sell it to Frank Harris at the Fortnightly Review, but Harris rejected it because he found it incomprehensible and Wells wasn't able to explain it to him because he didn't fully understand it himself. He was reaching, trying to come up with something he called a 'Universal Diagram.' It took a genius like Einstein to formulate those ideas and revolutionize scientific thought, but Wells was already intuitively heading in that direction. He couldn't really see it, but he knew something was there.

"Once I realized how far ahead of his time Wells was," Delaney continued. "I became interested and started studying his writings. People tend to think of him as merely a writer of imaginative fiction, but he was much more than that. He was an uncanny forecaster. He predicted Feminism, sexual liberation, Futurism and multinational economy. What Wells called 'socialism'wasn't really all that different from the democratic ideals of America from the late 20th century onward, Women in the work force, Sexual equality, Public education, Labor unions. National health plans, Social Security. What Wells did not realize was that these so- called 'socialist' ideas could exist within the framework of a capitalist society. But imagine how hewould have perceived the society we came from, where governments don't behave like independent nations so much as like interdependent corporations. Would he have understood the subtle distinctions? I don't think so. The Council of Nations would have seemed like the governing body of a world state to him and, in a way, it almost is, Technological development created a world structured like a spiderweb-touch one strand of the web and you create movement in all the other strands as well. To someone from this time period, it would look like a single entity, a 'world state.' You're focusing on the socialist label, but remember that the socialist of the late 19th century became the liberal of the 20th century. Wells wrote about the unfeasibility of economic fragmentation, but political fragmentation also proved unfeasible. We never did develop exclusively along the lines of socialism or capitalism or libertarianism. What eventually happened was a sort of natural synthesis brought about by technological development and a shrinking economic world. It began in the 20th century, when America started to adopt certain so-called 'socialist' ideas to put them into practice in a democratic society and the Soviet Union began to adopt certain 'capitalist' ideas and put them to work in the framework of a totalitarian, communist society. They were still paying lip service to different ideologies and they were still antagonistic, but the techno- economic matrix was already placing them on a course that would eventually intersect. Not even war could stop it. And that was precisely what Wells predicted, except he didn't use the same terms. Instead of a world state, what we wound up with is a sort of 'world confederation,' because the techno-economic matrix became a more powerful motivating force than any political ideology. It became a political ideology in itself and if you read him carefully, you'll realize that Wells knew it would happen!"