Mind At The End Of Its Tether
Feb. 4th, 2023 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloH.G. Wells is dying. He believes that not only his life but all life- Life with a capital "L"- is coming to an end. He derives this belief from his understanding of evolutionary theory.
Mind at the End of its tether is a sad book. Wells was continually up and down- now Utopian, now Dystopian- and it's a pity that his last published work should have coincided with one of his depressive moods. For all the intellectual adventuring he'd done in between, he winds up in much the same place he found himself- fifty years before- when he sent his Time Traveller into the far future. It's also an incoherent book- very short- but not well constructed or well argued. And the science- now 80 years old- is materialist, fatalistic, Victorian, superseded...
I've been hearing about this book for as long as I've been interested in Wells. I had expected it to be something terrific- and it's not.
Mind at the End of its tether is a sad book. Wells was continually up and down- now Utopian, now Dystopian- and it's a pity that his last published work should have coincided with one of his depressive moods. For all the intellectual adventuring he'd done in between, he winds up in much the same place he found himself- fifty years before- when he sent his Time Traveller into the far future. It's also an incoherent book- very short- but not well constructed or well argued. And the science- now 80 years old- is materialist, fatalistic, Victorian, superseded...
I've been hearing about this book for as long as I've been interested in Wells. I had expected it to be something terrific- and it's not.
