Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897–1901

This essay argues that information technologies profoundly inflected late-Victorian conceptions of imperial systems, focusing on the fin-de-siècle writing of H. G. Wells. In imperial satires likeThe War of the WorldsandThe First Men in the Moon, Wells elaborated monitory parables that used technologies like the telegraph and new wireless to construct an imperial chronotope associating territorial expansion with cultural extinction. Meanwhile, in his prophetic writing of the same period, Wells envisioned technologically saturated utopias premised upon the eradication of all difference. The case of Wells illustrates how media, as prostheses of thought, helped not only to articulate the imperial anxieties and fantasies of the age but also to gloss over the ideological faultlines between them.