Men Like Gods

Men Like Gods – H. G. Wells – Men Like Gods is a book by English author H. G. Wells, first published in 1923. Set in the summer of 1921, the story involves Mr. Barnstaple, a journalist who, becoming tired of his job, decides to take a holiday on his own. His plans for a quiet break are interrupted when his car is accidentally transported to another dimension called Utopia. An advanced earth that is around 3,000 years ahead of our own, Utopia is home to 200 million people and has no government, functioning instead as a successful anarchy. Barnstaple, along with two other 'earthlings' are quarantined for a while after they cause an epidemic in the new world. Whilst his unwitting companions hatch nefarious plans to conquer Utopia, Barnstaple longs to stay in the world. The Utopians however, tell him that right now, he can best serve them by returning to his own world, which he does with a new vigour and a determination to do his best to bring Utopia to our own earth.

Although reviews at the time of publication were largely positive, Wells did receive criticism for neglecting the science-fiction aspect of the novel, using the book instead to discuss his own ideas on how to achieve a better society.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the "father of science fiction.

During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the «Shakespeare of science fiction», while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a «wild talent».

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed «Wells's law» – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as «O Realist of the Fantastic!». His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.