Inventing Tomorrow

Sarah Cole transforms our view of H. G. Wells, not only seeing him as a pivotal figure in his own world but also, with subtlety and conviction, connecting him with his modernist contemporaries. Wells emerges in this detailed, cogent, and incisive study as a complex and fascinating thinker filled with contradictions, combining moral force with artistic restlessness. He was headstrong, engaged, combative, innovative, industrious, fearless, and prophetic. Inventing Tomorrow does justice to his vast range of work while emphasizing how Wells must be placed at the core of any consideration of intellectual life in the early twentieth century. -- Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn: A Novel
What if modernism met up with antimodernism, like matter and antimatter? In Sarah Cole’s fascinating and ambitious new study, she argues that H. G. Wells’s work was at once modernist and itself a critique of modernism, an explosive mix whose significance was missed both by his contemporaries and by literary critics who have taken his rivals at their word and mistaken their jealousy at his popularity for judgment of his merit. -- Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
From the prehistoric to the posthuman, from the microcosmic to the cosmic, Wells wrote about everything under the twentieth-century sun. To see why he was the indispensable writer of the last century, we need a guide as skilled and authoritative as Sarah Cole, who gives to readers an eloquent vindication of modernism’s forgotten man. -- Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development
Sarah Cole restores a colossus to size, recovering the enormous importance of H. G. Wells in the literary and cultural history of a century that seems, until now, to have left him behind. No longer. Written with synoptic power and narrative flair, synthesizing an extensive archive of print and film, Inventing Tomorrow splendidly establishes Wells not just as a figure of primary importance, but as an attractive, indeed fascinating, imaginative personality. -- Vincent Sherry, Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis
Full of illuminating argument, fresh perception, and lively polemic, Inventing Tomorrowmakes an overwhelming case for the twenty-first century rediscovery of H. G. Wells. -- Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading
Sarah Cole’s fascinating literary investigation Inventing Tomorrow shows how H. G. Wells’s work is relevant and meaningful today. . . . The book’s scholarship combines literary criticism with biographical elements, explaining how Wells mixed details of his own life and his modernist philosophy into his work. * Foreword Reviews (starred review) *
Cole documents a thorough and thoughtful appreciation of Well's accomplishments and skills as a writer to argue for a revised estimate of his body of work. * Library Journal *
Cole adroitly captures Wells, from his mould-breaking books (such as the 1895 science-fiction classic The Time Machine and 1920 Outline of History) to his unlikely intellectual kinship with subtle modernists such as Virginia Woolf. * Nature *
[H.G. Wells] emerges from this wide-ranging account as a passionate and persistent advocate of social change, and of literature’s capacity to shape it. * The Economist *
An important new evaluation of H.G. Wells. -- Maya Jasanoff * Wall Street Journal *
Inclusive, capacious, infectiously energetic work...Inventing Tomorrow is an invitation well worth taking up. * Politics / Letters *
While never ignoring untenable views about race and eugenics, [Cole] sees the point of him, saluting his humor and his relation to the world that formed him. Any subsequent work on Wells will have to take her as its starting point. -- D. J. Taylor * Wall Street Journal *
Cole’s dense, erudite and wide-ranging account demonstrates the grand sweep of his interests and ambitions. * Times Higher Education *
[Cole's] ingenious recasting of Wells as a dissident modernist seems likely to prove influential. * Times Literary Supplement *
A sympathetic and informative exploration of Wells as a writer and thinker. * Spiked *
In a landmark new study of Wells, Sarah Cole...reveals a writer whose twin obsessions with biology and history saturated his sense of humankind and its future prospects. Inventing Tomorrow restores Wells to his erstwhile centrality in the intellectual culture of the early twentieth century and unspools a “mix of attractive and repellent” ideas that resonate in an ambitious, anxious twenty-first. * New York Review of Books *
[A] substantial, well-written study. * Choice *
A magisterial book...beautifully written and persuasive throughout. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *
Is a deeply researched and compellingly argued defense of the author as a neglected modernist master whose work was in continuous, productive conversation with that of Woolf, Joyce, and other writers who are now more widely celebrated in the academy. * Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts *
Impressively comprehensive. * English Studies *
Cole has offered a portrait of Wells that at least acknowledges many of his shortcomings, including racism and a geopolitical vision tainted by imperialism, though these acknowledgments do not detract from her largely positive assessment of
his work * Twentieth Century Literature *