I recently read a 20th-century novel that has, approximately, this overall plot:<\/p>\r\n
Someone has invented something that has the potential to transform the world, but short-sighted politicians (and members of the clergy, and other regressive people) want to block the invention. A group of proponents of the new way, including a clear-sighted engineer who always knows what the obvious correct course of action is, gathers in a valley, isolated from the world, until it becomes clear that their way is the correct and good way of the future, and that the old bad ways will be overthrown.<\/p>\r\n
\u2026But the novel in question wasn\u2019t Atlas Shrugged<\/cite> (1957); it was H.G. Wells\u2019s The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth<\/cite> (1904).<\/p>\r\n (I haven\u2019t read Atlas Shrugged<\/cite>; I\u2019m just going by what I\u2019ve read about it. I may be wrong in thinking that the above vague\/general plot description seems fairly similar to its plot.)<\/p>\r\n I found Food of the Gods<\/cite> more engaging and interesting (and amusing) than the little Rand that I\u2019ve looked at; and for that matter, I found it more engaging than the other Wells novels that I\u2019ve read. (Which surprises me, especially because Food of the Gods<\/cite> is in large part satire, which usually doesn\u2019t appeal much to me.) And I\u2019m in much closer accord with Wells\u2019s political views than with Rand\u2019s.<\/p>\r\n But Food of the Gods<\/cite> nonetheless read to me as troublingly elitist\u2014the author\u2019s thumb is on the scale for the \u201cgreat\u201d giant people and against the \u201clittle\u201d traditionally-human-sized people.<\/p>\r\n It may well be that Wells\u2019s main point was that change happens, and preventing it is difficult (if not impossible) and often undesirable, and that through change\/progress we may eventually reach a utopian state of being. (Certainly the social ills that he points out in the novel are real ones.) (And Wells indicated that he saw the book as being about \u201cthe change of scale in human affairs.\u201d) But the personification of change in the form of the giant people (even though I think only three of them have names) reads to me a little too much like suggesting that some physical forms of people are inherently better than others. (I\u2019m pretty sure that Wells didn\u2019t mean to promote that idea; but it does seem to me to be pretty easy to read the book as promoting that idea.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20890,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20888\/revisions\/20890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}