ART AND LITERATURE
293
still further into the future, humanity has become extinct altogether, and
has been supplanted by a race of giant crabs; and these in turn disappear
after thirty million years, and the planet is left to liverworts, lichens, and
ice, and finally to unbroken entropic stillness, coldness, and darkness.
In short, evolution and progress have parted company for good, as they
have in other of Wells's "Scientific Romances," as he called them, allud–
ing in part to Morris's
Utopian Romance,
while differing in considerable
measure from Morris. Wells's utopian/dystopian narratives, in which the
genre of modern science fiction was virtually inaugurated, remain highly
readable, and some of them are puzzlingly and often playfully complex, but
when he directed his attention towards sober, secular prophecy in his so–
called "sociological" works, such as
Anticipations
if
the Reaction
if
Mechanical
and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought
(1902) or
A Modern
Utopia
(1905), his writings and speculations became much more period–
bound and constrained by his quasi-religious commitment to belief in a
world run by a hierarchy of engineers, technologists, and a range of other
scientists and "experts." Nevertheless, part of the lasting power of these
late-nineteenth century fictional worlds is that they are set off against a
background, or are situated within a context, created by centuries of
Utopian thinking, and in particular by the multitude of utopian prospects
created throughout the Enlightenment and afterwards, right up to the end
of the nineteenth century itself.
If we choose to take a momentary glimpse at our current situation from
the perspective generated by this context, we can make out something like
the following situation. The short twentieth century, which actually began
in 1914, came to an abrupt end in the years 1989-91, with the ending of
the Cold War, the coming down of the Berlin Wall, and the breakup and
dismemberment of the Eastern European satellite empire of the Soviet
Union, which was followed by the decomposition of the Soviet Union itself
into what looks like our contemporary equivalent of entropic disarray. To
my knowledge, this historic, Virtually millennial advent did not, or has not
yet, brought forth any formidable utopian imaginations. One such effort in
that direction which attracted a certain amount of attention at the begin–
ning of the decade, Francis Fukuyama's
The End
if
History and the Last Man,
confidently asserted that the planet was being integrated so rapidly that
Western values and institutions, such as democracy, the rule of law, capital–
ism, and freedom of expression would imminently be universally accepted
and that history would have then come to an end.
Utopia advenit.
Sometime
around 1992 it began to be noticed that these circumstances did not exact–
ly match the conditions that were prevailing in Yugoslavia, Africa, or the
former Soviet Union.
Sic transit gloria Utopiae.
Where else do we nowadays find utopian claims and envisagements?
Well, there are always the fundamentalists of technology to turn to. There
