review of H. G. Wells's "A Dream of Armageddon - The complete Supernatural Tales"

review of

H. G. Wells's "Babes in the Darkling Woods"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2417. "review of H. G. Wells's "Babes in the Darkling Wood""

- complete review

- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- uploaded to my Critic website after October 8, 2026

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticBabes.html

review of

H. G. Wells's "Babes in the Darkling Wood"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 8, 2026

The complete review is here:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticBabes.html

the truncated review is here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/9007714189

It seems to me that this 1940 novel of Wells's shd be one of his most famous ones but that doesn't appear to be the case. Acording to an online source, it was 1st published by Secker and Warburg in London in 1940 & then published in the edition I have by Alliance Book Corporation in New York in the same year. I was fortunate enuf to find this latter in 1st edition paperback, the edition I have is now 86 yrs old & still in good shape.

In general, it appears to me that Wells's SciFi is famous & the straight novels are mostly unknown. I get that insofar as I like the SF the most too. Nonetheless, his straight lit tackles hard subjects of his time & does so w/ substantial thoroughness. This novel is exemplary in that respect. The 2 central characters are young people trying to look at & respond to a world in a helluva mess that they hope to counterbalance. They're in England wch is beginning to be at war w/ Germany (WWII). The struggles of this young couple are shown both at a local level, as they defy the 'morals' of the older people around them, & at an international level, as they get thrown into the war. For me, Wells's treatment of all this is brilliant & very insightful. I have to wonder how it was rc'vd in England at the time given that he's critical of the British government & of the old established ways as much, if not more, than he is of Germany. He even goes so far as to state that some of the Brits are culpable b/c they're sympathetic to the Nazis - something that, as far as I know, is historically accurate.

This Alliance Book Corporation edition has ads on the back for 2 other bks: "Beyond Tears" by Irmgard Litten & "Out of the Night" by Jan Valtin. I've never heard of either of them but, judging by the blurbs, they both seem to be intelligently politically aware.

From the "Beyond Tears" blurb:

"In this personal indictment of the Nazi regime, more powerful in it simplicity than all the analytic discussions in their perplexity, in this home-spun story of a gragtuan struggle of a mother to save her son, accused only of humanitarianism, from the terrible tortures of the concentration camp."

From the "Out of the Night" blurb:

"This book will introduce you to a strange subterranean empire, an empire peopled with idealists turned plotters, with dreamers turned careerists, with rebels turned assassins, briefly, the generation orphaned by the first World War and condemned to become the makers of the present World War. This unique personal narrative weaves into one pattern the two great holocausts. OUT OF THE NIGHT is the tale of an irretrievably lost generation which has lived and worked underground in every quarter of the earth."

In the introduction, the nature of the novel is explained:

"Manifestly the novel of ideas and the play of ideas converge. My friend George Bernard Shaw has lived a long, vivid life, putting the discussion of ideas on to the English stage, to the infinite exasperation of generation after generation of dramatic critics, who insist upon puppets with heads of solid wood." - p xi

Lately, I've become more appreciative of description as something that I feel incapable of. Wells begins w/ such:

"A girl, still just short of twenty walked very gravely, lightly and happily beside her lover, a youngster of twenty-four, along an overgrown, sunken, sun-flecked lane in Suffolk. The lane ran sometimes between fields and sometimes along the boundaries of pleasant residences, and it led from the village green at the centre of all things to the cottage they occupied. It was early in June. Lilac was dropping but the may was at its last and best; and countless constellations of stitchwort, clusters and nebulae, celebrated a brief ascendency over the prmiscuous profusion of the hedge-banks." - p 3

Yes, I think a knowledge of plant-life is important. I lack it.

Wells has his characters, Stella & Gemini, critiqueing their own privilege.

"["]Why should I be worried because Chinese kids are being raped and disembowelled for fun by the Japs in Shanghai? Why should I be worried because they are being sold to the brothels and given syphilis and driven to death and all that, under the approving noses of our own blessed Pukka Sahibs in Hong Kong? Lousy Pukka Sahibs! Dirty old Blimps! . . . This, that and the other horror, up and down the world. That concentration camp stuff. . . .["]"

[..]

""What can we do?" he echoed. "Oh hell! Stella, what can we do? Being a Communist! What's being a Communist? What good is it? Trotsky and Stalin don't matter a damn to me. Conscientious objectors-objectors to being alive, I suppose. This, this muddle, is life. How can we stand out of it? . . . Anti-Fascist? . . . What party is there to work with; what leader can one follow?["]" - pp 6-7

Wells introduces characters of varying degrees of presence, these characters can be referred to later as types w/o having to be present again. Balch, a reporter, is one of them. Gemini holds forth to him.

""We;re the heirs of a bankrupt world," said Gemini. "The religions, the patriotisms, have all killed one another. This war, this war that is going to drink us all up, will be a war about nothing, because the sense has gone out of everything. Worse than the War to End War. Whichever way it goes, things after it will be worse than ever.["]" - p 16

Balch holds forth in turn.

"["]If they clap you into a uniform and put a rifle in your hand, you owe them no obedience. None. If they put an oath into your mouth it doesn't matter. No oath can hold you that you don't make of your own free accord. Whether you let fly at the man in front of you, or your office, or the ammunition dump or into the air or try potting the War Boss himself, depends upon just what you think will help most to release the Unrevealed World. . . ."" - pp 21-22

"["]Darkest hour before the Dawn! Hitler? What's Hitler? The ultimate Cain? The last parricide? Can he prevail? Don't tell me. Japan? A final black-out? The end of all things? No! A thousand times, No! Nerve storms. Fits of evil temper. I tell you the dawn's breaking.["]" - p 23

Balch & Gemini continue - w/ Balch introducing the idea of anarchy - something Wells apparently disapproves of.

"["]This is what the Anarchists have been feeling their way towards. Shelley, Kropotkin. . . . If you can call Shelley an Anarchist.["]"

[..]

""There can be no idea of anarchy in a world of reasonable men," said Gemini's submerged voice." - p 25

The local clergy visits Stella & Gemini at the cottage where they've gone to satisfy their 'non-sanctified' urges. Gemini introduces himself.

""Unperformed dramatist, Sir, mute poet, indispensible clerk in the Penguin Press organization, reserve literary worker for the Propaganda Department. Too lame for military service-leg crushed some years ago.["]" - p 29

How long will it be before Penguin is forgotten? There was a Penguin Books warehouse near where I lived when I was growing up outside of Baltimore City from the 1950s to the 1970s. B/c of this, there were Penguin Books easily accessible in my area. I loved them, they were one of my favorite publishers. I read that they were absorbed by Random House in 2013 & that Random House has also been absorbed.

Uncle Robert Kentlake is the brother of Stella's father. He's an intellectual influence of both Gemini & Stella.

"Doctor Kentlake, pursued Gemini, allowing no intervention, treated the universe as being of one nature throughout, would have nothing to do with that ancient primary oposition. You couldn't call him materialist; you couldn't call him spiritualist. "Monist" was a better word." - p 39

"It was just as unreasonable to say the world was all matter, as it was to say it was all movement, or all electricity or all rhythm or all beauty or all imagination." - p 40

Yes, this is a "novel of ideas" expressed thru dialog between remarkable characters & there's nothing lazy about it. Atheism is one of the subjects broached.

"["]We two-in all honesty-nrought up in a Christian country-do sincerely believe that Christianity, in itself, and apart from other humanising influences, has been an evil rather than a good thing in human life, and that for the past century or more in particular it has been a barrier to human enlightenment. We want you to understand clearly that we have no sort of religious belief at all, in Providence, in a Supreme Being or in anything of the sort. We two are Atheists right out["]" - p 47

Stella's Uncle Hubert discovers that Stella & Gemini are living in unwedded bliss & sends them a threatening post saying he'll be there soon to put ane end to their relationship.

"["]What you have done is an indictable offence. I shall come by the first train to-morrow. At considerable inconvenience to myself. I give you fair warning to clear out before I come to fetch her home. I may not be able to keep my hands off you. That's all. Clear out of my way before I get hold of you. Best for all parties. I may see red. Horsewhipping is too good for you, you filthy young hound."" - p 51

Now the time of this section is 1939. Things have changed. Nonrtheless, when my girlfriend & I went looking to rent an apartment in BalTimore in 1976 the man from the real estate agency refused to let us have an apartment b/c we weren't married - & we were both in our early 20s. The landlord refusing us had one of those red faces that usually signifies, to me, alcoholism or some other health problem. Do landlords in the US & the UK still refuse renting to unmarried couples? Probably. Somewhere.

""After all. This is just one single scribbled letter, and it has shattered us. All our self-satisfacrion."

""Has it shattered us? I don't think so, Gemini. We're kids yet. Rather helpless. We've jumped into what suddenly looks like an impossible situation. We are kids, you know. All the same, the things we have thought and said this last week; they hold good, Gemini?"

""Sound enough. But this brutality, this bawling vulgarity. . . ."

""But that is what we have known we were up against all along. We-we stand for life. Haven't we said that over and over again? We stand for the free, abundant, life. We are against compulsion, against uncriticised direction, against war. We've been talking all the time about war and how we had to put an end to it. Our sort of people.["]" - p 57

I've been an anti-war activist for most of my life & it never ceases to amaze me that the US has been at war the entire time. Surely, most people don't want war.. &, yet, here it is. Of course, it doesn't take a majority to create war, only a powerful minority, governments, arms manufacturers, religious fanatics..

"["]It doesn't matter hpw rotten the world is, they'll be against a better one. They've impulses to triumph, revenge, hate and cruel self-assertion that they know a better world would never allow. And a still greater multitude will bar every effort you make to spread this great idea of yours, out of fear. It seems so clear, sweet and reasonable to us, but the very first movement towards it will seem to them weird, horrible, wicked.["]" - p 64

Gemini's father, a judge, attacks him.

"["]Bolshevism, Republicanism, Atheism. All very bright and witty no doubt and all completely silly."

""I believed in these things."

""Believed!"

"There was no answering that. He passed to Gemini's life in London. "Idleness," he said. "Discursiveness. Ill-chosen friends. I know more than you suppose of the life you have led. I know of the parties you have attended, the hours you have kept. Studios, cocktail parties, night boozing with artists, actors, actresses and models, loose women, fantastic meetings and fights in the East End["]" - p 89

"["]do you imagine that you can stop the march of history now, just as you might hold out your hand to stop a bus, and go right back again to the beginning and start a new world?"

""That, Sir, is precisely what we think possible," said Gemini, "We are revolutionaries."" - p 95

"["]We think this quasi-Christian civilisation of yours in particular, with all its piled-up political and social associations, its mulish insistence on the thing that is-yes, Sir mulish. I must use the proper word is what stands in the way of that possible better world.["]" - p 100

"Secondly, we have agreed that in this gross, confused, moving and dangerous mass of a world as it is, there is hidden the possibility of a human existence of so general a happiness, such liveliness of interest and such abundance as no living species has ever yet known. Look at flowers, light in a thousand refractions, in sunsets, crystals, ripples, look at beautiful bodies, think of music, art, poetry-there are the mere fisrt intimations of the possibility of life a man might shape it. We believe that by a strenous readjustment of mental and social life, a good, lovely and continually progressive world could be carved out of this enormous dreadful world of today, as a sculptor carves loveliness out of block.["]" - p 116

Do I believe that? No, but I love reading the possibility expressed.

"["]Fixing upon the 'Capitalist System' as the central evil in human affairs, was one the primary blunders of that purblind old pedant Marx. It was merely the current form of interception and appropriation in the nineteenth century. Uncle Robert has cleaned up all that. Thank heaven for Uncle Robert! No doubt there's something to be said for old Marx, but not now. Not until people have escaped from him." - p 118

Or, as I like to say, 'Thank the Holy Ceiling Light!'

"A lot of them professed an ignorant and implacable communism. Even when they were not actually active communists they were agreed that Karl Marx was a tremendous authority upon political and social science. Why, they did not know. They thought strikes and hunger marches the quintessemce of politics and Soviet Russia heaven on earth." - p 194

"["]Our renascent Revolution (1939 pattern) has to keep statement alive and flexible. Ours is a new pattern of revolution. It is Post-Communism.["]" - p 119

Wells expresses a rejection of Anarchism AND postulates a "Post-Communism". That's very ambitious of him. So what does he choose to endorse?

{"]into what a psychoanalyst calls the Unconscious, but which, according to your Behaviourist, is merely a multitude of reaction systems 'out of contact with your main directive system.' You see the difference? The psychoanalyst says they are down below in a dungeon, the Behaviourist says they are at large outside. All the difference in the world there. Jung, if I remember rightly, calls this accumulation of of inoperative mental stire the anima.["]" - p 178

Behaviourism - wch has gotten a bad rep w/ leftists as mechanistically control-freaking. That might be mainly b/c of B. F. Skinner's bk "Walden Two" wch I've never read but wch is sd to reject free will. It didn't come along until 1948, 8 yrs after this novel of Wells's so who knows what Wells's take on Behaviourism might've been if "Walden Two" had come a decade earlier.

Stella goes to Cambridge, only to be disappointed.

""Strange, I'm going back to the very centre of the intellectual life of this most civilised country, I'm told it is, in the world. In some ways perhaps it is. I've been here two years and there is not a soul I can talk to about fundamental things, not a soul."" - p 192

Uncle Robert goes off on a rant of his own about the lacks of 'higher education'.

"["]To this day you can go right through to a B.A. degree here in the blackest, most self-satisfied ignorance of the modern vision of the process of life in time. In that matter alone this venerable man-making organisation is, as a man-making organisation , a hundred years out of date.["]" - p 206

More or less every diatribe goes on at length.

""They have taught you a little Latin, less Greek, some French, German and any Itlian word you might meet in a musical score. Have they ever pointed out to you that there is hardly a single word in English, hardly an idiom, that has a precise equivalent in any of these other languages? Languages correspond-yes; but roughly and loosely.["]" - p 209

I've discussed this before, in various works, but esp in relation to languages that're disappearing. My friend Florian Cramer told me that my motto "Anything is Anything" has no direct translation in German. When my French Canadian friends tried to translate "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" for me into French they always failed.

Gemini, in pursuit of his revolutionay goals, has whereabouts no longer known to his English friends, even Stella, as a consequence of the chaos from the beginnings of the war.

"Late in August, Gemini had started for what even in those last days was still the ambiguous wonderland of Soviet Russia, the land of a vague millenium obscured by enigmatic shadows." - p 217

Gemini's mom is a Women's Rights activist & a Christian Scientist.

""Christian Science. I do not think I could have gone on living without it. You realise there is no such things as bodily pain or physical evil. It is all imagination; it is within your control. Amd when disagreeable things have to be endured, you can realise they are not happening. You can treat them.["]" - p 222

Gemini's whereabouts are still unknown but a traveling vompanion of his appears in London & gives Gemini's eager friends & family an earful.

"["]Riga was in utter confusion; swarming with Polish refugees, Jews, expropriated Balts trying to get to Germany, spies, Germans, Russians, frightened people of all sorts. The hotels and everything stacked with people trying to get away. We had the greatest difficulty in getting a room and a change of clothes. We had to buy everything. People would not take us in. We were unspeakably filthy and verminous after what we'd been through.["]" - pp 248-249

When Gemini is finally found he's in medical care in another country & denying all desire to see Stella or his mom. His mom comments on this to Stella.

""Well, you have to realise, Stella, that almost every man in the world finds it necessary to believe that he is beyond all comparison warm and wonderful, in fact incomporable as a lover, that there never has been and cannot be anyone to equal him-if not in the eyes of all womankind then at least to the lady on whom he confers the-the privilege. She is understood to be dazzled. She is enslaved. More than one, if possible. Some of them, like Casanova and Frank Harris, have written long books about their gifts in this respect. They make the monkeys in the zoo seem quite delicate little creatures. They call it virility nowadays. But probably you read more books than I do. These modern young men! You never know what you won't find on the next page. They really ought to be book-trained just as cats are house-trained. . . .["]" - p 284

So Gemini's in a mental hospital where a psychotherapist is getting paid good money to treat him. Gemini's mom goes to scope out the situation & ultimately has different ideas about what's to be done.

""And the object of his treatment, he says, is to get down to the Oedipus complex in Jimmy-in other words to discover an incorrectly repressed incestuous passion between him and me. He is to be questioned and badgered about whether there is any antagonism between myself and my husband, whether he has taken sides between us in any domestic difference, and if possible I am to be questioned and badgered about whether I preferred my father to my husband and so on. All these are things that verge upon reality, and none of them have the least touch of the obscenity and profundity that Dr. Bjorminder wants to thrust upon them.

""And then at last when our guilty secret is laid bare, what then? That I cannot discover. Something is going to be dealt with and dispelled. But what and how?["]" - p 294

Gemini's mom gets him out of the psychotherapist's clutches & brings him home to the much wiser & more wily care of Uncle Robert.

"one sunlit day in early March, Gemini became aware of himself in an extremely comfortable bed in an extremely comfortable room. The broad window was closed, but it was so nrightly clean that it might have been open for any diminution it made in the clear tranquil lucidity of the grey gable and the budding grape-vine spread out upon it, outside. Some rascal sparrows were rustling among the stringy branches, and a very delicate sprig of ivy reached out beyond the window frame. He lay for a time observing these things in complete contentment." - p 299

Uncle Robert holds forth on his method of treating Gemini.

"["]Those psychoanalysts believe-as everyone has believed since thinking began-that there is a concrete continuous thing in a human being called the mind or the soul or the psyche or the self. Bit now all that has been undermined. These psychoanalysts believe, as all the world before them has believed, that in mental disease this simple, originally unified something goes to pieces, as people say. They treat every morbid mental phenomeon as a splitting, a falling away, a deflection. So that this sub-conscious of theirs is a sort of cellar in which things are dumped by the consciousness, the one way in. All the manias and phobias, all the secondary selves and complexes are thought of-without any further enquiry-as stuff of the original self in rebellion.["]" - p 304

Uncle Robert's prying loose of Gemini's original personality depends on sneak attacks.

"And pray hwne did you hear of Cottenham C. Bower? You went down from Oxford-it was Oxford, wasn't it?-some years before anybody ever heard of him. And so far as I know Oxford has never heard of him to this day. Suppose now you go to sleep."

""Everybody has heard about Cottenham C. Bower and his The Expansion of Sex. He's not a psychologist, you're wrong about that; he's a biologist-a zoologist or something of that sort-at some Western University. Radnor Smith? That's the name of it. Not Western-Georgia. A biologist. That's how he got his freshness of approach."" - p 312

Uncle Robert tricks Gemini into being responsive by deliberately saying incorrect things in order to trigger Gemini into correcting him. He knows that Gemini is familiar w/ Bower's work, he knows that Gemini went to Cambridge.

Uncle Robert defends his 'Ivory Tower' position.

"["]I'm not going to start swapping experiences with you in a sort of game of 'beggar my neighbor.' A man may get deeper into life in a quiet room in Wimpole Street than by running about during the worst of air raids.["]" - p 320

Personally, I think that's bullshit.

""This impotence of yours you're making such a fuss about is all part of the same thing. It's the symbol and quintessence of the whole thing. You want to make love. Every natural human being wantsd to make love. But you are afraid to make love because at one and the same time you think you will not be able to do so and also you think that if you are able to do so, your excuse of utter defeat will be taken from you.["]" - p 324

""And what has your generation been banking on?"

""It is absurd but it is true. At the back of the thought of all my generation was Soviet Russia. We did think that there something saner, more generous and juster than the outworn, self-deceiving selfishness of capitalism, had established itself. It was something more primitive and fundamental and yet wiser and scientific. We hung on to that.["]"

[..]

""Soviet Russia gave us the background for all our defiances and braveries. Faith in Russia contained our minds and when the container broke-"

""It broke?" said Dr Kentlake.

""Obviously it broke."

""Finland?"

""Finland settled it. For me.

""But even before that, weren't there one or two little things, the trials for example? And the purges?"

""We were rather shaken by the trials. But they didn't break us."

""The Trotsly-Stalin feud? The glorification of Stalin in such a film-did you see it?- as Lenin in October. You saw it! So did I. Most illuminating. And various other little things? . . ."

""We held on. We held on all the more because of the way people rubbed all that in. Until I got to Finland. . . ."" - pp 326-327

The AI overview of Soviet Russia & Finland at the time:

Soviet Russia (the Soviet Union) invaded Finland on November 30, 1939, starting the Winter War.

Key Actions and Events in 1939

· Territorial Demands: In October 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded that Finland cede the Karelian Isthmus, lease the Hanko Peninsula for a naval base, give up islands in the Gulf of Finland, and move its border back away from Leningrad. Finland refused these demands.

· The Mainila Shelling (False Flag): On November 26, 1939, Soviet forces shelled their own border village of Mainila. Moscow blamed Finland for the attack to manufacture a pretext for war.

· The Invasion: On November 30, 1939, the Red Army launched a full-scale invasion of Finland without a formal declaration of war. Soviet troops bombed cities like Helsinki and crossed the border with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, tanks, and aircraft.

· Finnish Resistance: Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Finnish military used effective ski tactics, forest camouflage, and defensive positions along the Mannerheim Line to inflict massive casualties and stall the Soviet advance through the harsh winter.

Professor Kentlake (Uncle Robert) holds forth on the relation between Stalin & Gorki.

"["]That is why he was so fantastically disturbed by the death of Gorki, because you see he was in the habit of going off to Gorki, who stood to him in a relation something between what the Americans call a stooge and a father confessor, and talking his views and intentions over with him. At all hours. He knows himself tp be moody, He knows he has phases of irrational violence, and when he had Gorki he could go and talk and see himself reflected. He could be restrained from doing something foolish and cruel. . . ."

""Those wretched doctors were also fantastically upset by the death of Gorki."

""That doesn't touch my explanation. He thought they had murdered Gorki to cripple himself. Pure treason! He gave them a public trial and there was no Gorki to reason with him. They were shot. That's not diabolical, Twain. That's infantile. It's quite common.["]" - p 332

On p 336 a new chapter begins w/ a shocking title: "THE KILLING OF UNCLE ROBERT", Uncle Robert having been the voice of wisdom throughout this marks quite a turn.

A sculptor's block of unsculpted alabaster had been the catalyst for Stella & Gemini's sense of purpose in life. The sculptor is a Bulgarian immigrant. Gemini & Stella are shocked to learn that under the watime conditions he's been interned as a suspicious individual.

""All the same, it was decided to intern him."

""But I heard he was going to be naturalised as an English man!"

""Not in war-time," said the vicar. "Yes, I remember hearing about it from Colonel Gusset. Your friend-well, Mr. Kalikov-made a very poor showing. He lost his temper with the tribunal. He tried to be sarcastic in that German accent of his, and that did him no good, you can be sure, with a resolute man like Colonel Gusset."

""But it's not a German accent," said Stella.

""It sounded German to the tribunal," said the vicar."

[..]

""But to intern him!"

""We can't be too careful. After all, we are less than twenty miles from the coast. And I'm not certain he wasn't more or less of a Jew. All that hair of his."

""But we're not at war with the Jews! And Kalikov isn't a Jewish name."

""There are Jews and Jews, and they take all sorts of names. They are really all alike," said the vicar, and dismissed that increasingly difficult topic. "Anyway he's interned."" - p 358

Wells exposes the ignorant bigotry of the English mindset under wartime conditions, an ignorant bigotry likely to dominate in any country's wartime conditions. Who cares whether it makes sense to intern someone suspected of being Jewish in defense against a country that's interning Jews?!

""Is being cowed, sanity?" said Stella. "I doubt it. One begins to be afraid to say anything for fear of being misunderstood, of doing anything except join in the screams and rushes of the crowd. That's not having a sane, free mind. Can anyone keep sane when the world goes mad?"" - p 363

& I've been saying for quite some time now that the US is in a permanent state of war largely to foster such an obedient & fearful mindset. In addition to the actual physical wars, the massacres, there's been the War Against Communism, the War Against Drugs, the War Against Terrorism, & the War Against Covid-19 - all of them very effective in cowing the general populace.

"["]We wo want to save it for our own dream. We don't want a downfall of mankind. No. What will it matter to us that some crippled outcome of man's seed, hobgoblins and fairies, Morlocks and Eloi, emerge at the other side of this great debacle? If Homo sapiens fails in his promise, then I do not care whether it is his degenerate descendents, post-human monsters, Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, or whether it is totalitarian ants or rats or mice or what not which come next in the succession. Fate may override us in the end, but that is not our affair. I am for that Homo sapiens who is my quintessence, who is everything I desire and might be, living in this world as I would have it. . . .["]" - pp 373-374

I feel ya, Gemini.

Wells's references to his own "The Time Machine" & Stapleton's "Last and First Men" particularly appeals to me here since it points to Science Fiction as the genre that addresses possible future outcomes of comtemporary practices.

"["]the entire possibility of affecting the texture and quality of the human brain, multiplying its cells, making its fibres more delicate, by prenatal injections. No need to wait for eugenics. We may soon be able to life the human intelligence long before the human individual is born.["]" - p 374

Genetic Modification, something I'm very wary of. When such an opinion is expressed to some people they automatically assume that it represents a religious objection, a belief in god - but I'm an atheist, what I 'believe' in is NATURE. See my review of

The President's Council on Bioethics's "Beyond Therapy - Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness": https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4029224855 . Unfortunately, the full review has been removed from online so that's only the link to the truncated review. I highly recommend reading my bk "THE SCIENCE (volume 1)": http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2022SCIENCE.html wch contains the complete review & much more of potential relevance.

"he ticked off his international commissions on his fingers-"an effective disarmament commission, a reparation commission, an international commission for the restoration of the displaced populations, an air and general transport commission, and a commission for the restoration of production by some readjustment of money and barter, all in operation quite soon. Their work, once it begins, may stretch over years. . . .["]" - p 385

How many people really give much thought to such things? & how many of those people are likely to cause more harm than good? How much harm did the Catholic Church cause in its 400+ yrs inquisition? How much harm did Germany cause in its Nazi era? How much harm did the United States cause when it invaded Vietnam? How much reparation have any of these entities made to try to restore some justice?

"["]What's going to happen to the under-dog in the future, and what's going to happen to free-minded, criticising people? And how long will it go on at that level?["]" - p 397

To speak from my own experience, what's happening to "free-minded, criticising people" now, 86 yrs after the writing of this novel, is that we're shunned & character-assassinated. To use a contemporary term, we're 'ghosted'. Electronic communications makes it easier to just act like the undesirable simply isn't there.

""There is this movement we hear about, to bring together all the Left movements of the world by a common Declaration of the Rights of Man.["]" - pp 388-389

Interesting. I don't recall ever hearing about this before.

"["]The whole human outlook is dominated by the need for an immense revision, expansion, reorganisation of our knowledge-machinery and our mental and moral instruction. We have to bring that up to the new scale of life, and at present, and particularly here in England, nobody seems disposed to do anything about it at all.["]" - p 396

"So it was, set forth as plainly and completely as possible, that two very intelligent young people were living and thinking about life between June in 1939 and May in 1940. The accidents of their birth, training, and character had brought them into the closest contact with the latest and most penetrating thought of their time; and through all their mental exercises, they were responding to the primordial and inseperable urgencies of sex and self-assertion." - p 407

Indeed. & while I may seem to've revealed too many highlights of this novel, thr true importance of reading it requires reading ALL of the conversations, not just snippets.

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