On an Alpine exhibition Wells and his friend, the Botanist, slip through a space-warp and find themselves on another Earth, on the far side of the galaxy. But this is an Earth run on rational lines, with a world government, common ownership, comprehensive welfare provision, racial and sexual equality and respect for the ecosystem. No writer imagined more 'otherworlds' than H.G.Wells. A Modern Utopia is one of his rare visions of a positive world, but it is one that must be ruled by an elite - the 'Samurai', an austere, voluntary nobility, among whom is another Mr Wells.Krishan Kumar wrote (in the introduction to that volume):
'. . . Here (A Modern Utopia) Wells was at the height of his powers. The vivd imagination of the early science fantasies still served him. He had just finished Kipps, the best of his humorous and sharply critical novels about the 'little men' who try, and fail, to find a secure place for themselves in society . . . (He was) in a period of immmensely creative exploration and experimentation. The writing is fresh and bubbles over with vitality. This is as true of A Modern Utopia - an overtly social and political work - as it is of his other writings of the time.'A Utopia, Wells decided, was the best vehicle for expressing his current thinking. But what kind of utopia? What should be its form? This problem, as Wells tells us, gave him considerable trouble. He had been reading widely in the classical utopian literature - Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun (1623), Bacon's New Atlantis. He had paid particular attention to the more recent nineteenth-century examples, most of them socialist utopias of one kind or another: Ethienne Cabet's Voyage to Icaria (1840), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890) and Theodor Hertzka's Freeland (1891). All these, Plato and More especially, influenced him a good deal, as can be seen from the numerous references to them in the text. But the form of A Modern Utopia is all Well's own.
In A Modern Utopia Wells presents us with a world in which all, or nearly all, the age-old problems of humanity have been solved. People live healthy and happy lives in beautiful cities. There is universal security and general economic equality, although not at the price of abolishing individual incentives, which are necessary to stimulate innovation and so achieve social progress. Travel is worldwide, by means of vast, luxurious trains that hurtle across the earth at two hundred miles an hour (one such takes our travellers to Utopian London -England- aided by a Channel tunnel). Machines are indeed everywhere in evidence - this is no arcadian utopia, in the manner of William Morris's News From Nowhere. Wells rather follows Cabet and Bellamy in favouring the greatest possible degree of mechanisation, to abolish toil and free mankind at last from the curse laid upon Adam . . . (This) is not the socialism of Marx, or of most twentieth centurt social democrats. It is neither democratic or egalitarian, and it has nothing to do with class war. Its sources are Plato and More . . . It owes even more to Bacon's New Atlantis, which Wells called the greatest of the scientific utopias'.