Sarah Cole’s Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, published in late 2019, is the first study of Wells to focus on his connections to and conflicts with literary modernism. Whereas other studies treat his most widely read, most “prescient,” or most politically relevant stories, Inventing Tomorrow seeks a grand Wellsian view of his entire oeuvre, produced over a half-century career. By juxtaposing his work with that of canonized modernist authors, Cole explicates modernists’ influence on what has constituted “literature” since the early twentieth century. Where scholars and critics have long denigrated his and his literary inheritors’ work as “pulp” or “popular,” Cole takes a more positive view, calling for a new future for Wells scholarship in literary modernism. Nor does her positive outlook resemble the fandom endemic to late twentieth-century science fiction scholarship, which has so often lionized Wells for his admittedly considerable contributions to genre fiction and sought to legitimize this work and, along with it, the science fiction genre of which he has been named one of the “fathers.” On the contrary, more than many others, Cole has offered a portrait of Wells that at least acknowledges many of his shortcomings, including racism and a geopolitical vision tainted by imperialism, though these acknowledgments do not detract from her largely positive assessment of his work.Although Wells is commonly treated as a Victorian or Edwardian writer, Cole seeks to place him among oft-studied and better-known modernists, “as one of the period’s great literary innovators,” and “to show how his writing also clashes with modernist values as they have been enshrined by literary critics over the last seventy years” (4). Her comparative approach discovers Wells’s connections with modernists, including Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Violet Hunt, Henry James, James Joyce, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Dorothy Richardson, Margaret Sanger, and Rebecca West. Inventing Tomorrow’s argument centers on a comparison of Wells with Virginia Woolf and focuses on two pointed questions: what has discounting Wells’s vision for fiction writing meant for our understanding of modernism? And how can a return to his work offer fresh literary perspective on the twentieth century at large? These questions arise from Cole’s return to the moment “when the question of how literature would engage the public world was fundamentally up for grabs” (4), a moment defined by Wells’s An Englishman Looks at the World (1914) and Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” (1919). Juxtaposing these works, she argues that both authors agreed on the novel’s scope: “We are going to write . . . about the whole of human life” (5) wrote Wells, because, as Woolf noted, “everything is the proper stuff of fiction” (4). But she also considers the divergence of their literary visions: whereas Wells saw the novel in external, objectivist terms, as “the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas” (5), Woolf envisioned an inward turn in which the novel could be made to express “every feeling, every thought . . . every quality of brain and spirit” (4). In other words, Cole argues, “We find in Wells a path that literary culture chose not to take, and are invited to think anew about some of the century’s ingrained assumptions about literary values and ambitions” (2).Although this comparison yields fresh perspective on Wells, Cole’s treatment of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group could easily be taken to mean that she sees them as representative of modernism. But instead, she is focusing on one of the most influential critical moments in modernism, when a leading figure, Woolf, uses Wells’s work as a foil in promoting her own critical point of view. Whereas Woolf and other modernists insisted on a new mode of writing defined by fresh perspectives on their milieu, Wells “made it his project to construct a new future—to invent tomorrow—one that would be less violent, ugly, and unjust than his present, even as he offered up some of the era’s most memorable visions of dystopia and extinction” (11). This explanation points to Cole’s main project, wherein she addresses several aspects of Wells’s work: his authorial voice, his civilian perspective on world war and international politics, his imaginative attention to the nature of time, and his conviction that biology was fundamental to future social (and literary) possibilities.Cole reads Wells’s authorial voice as a “playing out [of] his private preoccupations,” through which “he created a literature of universal dilemmas” (60). By fixating on the futurism and scientific content of Wells’s works, critics sometimes miss his autopoeisis. Although self-revelation characterizes the writing of Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and others, Cole argues that Wells is, “in his own specific way, one of the most self-revelatory of all the writers of the modernist era” (61). Wells’s self-revelation is unique, though, because the new type of “essay-novel” he developed is impossible to sunder from his “authorial persona, roving through his works across every genre,” “declaiming” modernity (62). He also pursued future possibilities with a characteristically modernist visuality, implying that the storytelling of the future would have to engage the senses, vision most immediately, given the proliferation of cinema at the time. Cole underscores “how richly Wells’s writings anticipate and give depth, texture, vividness, drama, and figuration to a range of visual possibilities that . . . would become realized in film,” calling to mind Elaine Showalter’s (1992: xxi) observation that “Woolf makes use of such devices as montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts.”Wells’s fiction juxtaposes the sensory experiences of war with reflections on the senselessness of its causes, a fictional approach that, paradoxically, makes sense coming from a civilian perspective, which Cole sees as essentially Wellsian. “Wells took up the task of imagining war as a calling, and to do so from many positions, a kind of ongoing straining of the sensory apparatus in the face of something not only enormously beyond the scope of any viewer but designed precisely to injure the viewer’s ability to see or record” (112). To what extent was Wells’s a civilian perspective, though? His role in Britain’s Ministry of Propaganda, his access to world leaders, and his attempts to influence modern governments, society, and technology through print, starting with Anticipations (1902), all suggest that Wells, hardly an ordinary civilian, should instead be considered a government bureaucrat. When it comes to defining his relationship to modernism, the distinction between civilian and bureaucrat matters because in both his government work and his popular nonfiction, Wells advocated a centralized, scientifically informed, globe-spanning modern future likely to issue in the sort of social constraints Woolf and other modernists abjured. Established modernists created protagonists who resisted, subverted, and sometimes succumbed to the forces of modernity, as seen in Clarissa Dalloway and Stephen Dedalus. Although Wells’s protagonists were often dwarfed by modernity, he couldn’t resist giving them the Nietzschean Übermensch’s perspective on the modern future, and he often deployed such glimpses as a critique of the status quo. For example, from aboard a Zeppelin in The War in the AirWells (1908: 116) gave Bert Smallways, his protagonist, an aerial view of both the well-designed “geometrical” layout of a German airfield and the unplanned sprawl of modernizing England, with a “multitude of factories and chimneys . . . old railway viaducts, monorail networks and goods yards, and the vast areas of dingy homes and narrow streets, spreading aimlessly” (141). In the novel, German pilots blithely bypass England en route to decimate an unsuspecting New York City. Read in the context of Wells’s habitual critique that England was a technological laggard, this juxtaposition is another of his calls for better social planning, which, to many modernists, would have suggested more impingement on the individual.This version of Wells harmonizes with Cole’s treatment of his temporal imagination in The Time Machine (1895), which she traces to “a whole host of [imaginative] forays into a future that we might—Wells would say we must—plan” (152). This reads like an invitation to consider the future and literature’s role in it, which, true to the modern novel’s self-reflective tendencies, also entails literature’s own future. Thus, by considering Wells’s oeuvre as modernist, Cole regards the disjunction between his technological futurism and Woolf’s intense concern with the human condition as merely another dissonance. This reconfigures the relationship between science fiction, such as Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” or Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” and modernism—historically, the two have been treated within entirely separate genre systems (Rieder 2017: 3–7)—and opens a horizon for exploring modernism’s influence on genre fiction, a parallel to l’art nouveau’s influence on ephemera, such as posters, instead of gallery art.Cole prefaces her inquiry with a key question: How might last century’s literature have shaped and continue to shape our perception of what is now biologically, technologically, socially, and geopolitically possible? Wells’s thinking is central to how this question has been answered historically, and that centrality is reason enough to reconsider his importance to modernism. He has been recognized for introducing time travel via The Time Machine and for his conviction that the future— particularly the future of technology—is knowable in the way that the past is knowable, as seen in several of his works, including Anticipations, The Discovery of the Future (1913), and The Outline of History (1920). Whereas Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism was framed with “destructive glee” (166), Cole sees Wells’s futurism as evidence of his genuine interest in the shape the future would take, and she points out that Wells saw the past as instrumental in anticipating the shape of the future, even if he felt weighed down by the literary influence of nineteenth-century Britain. Wells had studied under T. H. Huxley and his first monograph was a Text-Book of Biology (1893); Cole argues that he retained his original biological outlook as foundational to what was possible. Wells did not believe in stasis and persistently raised questions about what humans, society, and Earth could and could not become as well as what they should become. In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) Cole sees a modernist abjuration of social constraints in Wells’s emphasis on the amorality of experimentation, which wrenched his readers’ focus from morality as defined by religion, law, civility, or patriotism, turning it to what is biologically possible. Moreover, she notes that for Wells “the interior body in its fully organic, biological aspect is an unstinting trove of imaginative possibility, the pulsating home of . . . life” (264) from which emerges an energetic drive toward becoming. Wells believed that life always moves, grows, and reproduces; and this concept of life defines his oeuvre’s outward push from the miniscule cell to the macrocosm of the cosmos across time. Cole points out that for Wells “living beings are significantly defined by what lies invisibly inside them,” and the “enterprise” of “plung[ing] into the mysterious interior of the human mind or body” (263) was something the modernists—including Wells—shared.The sheer ambition of Cole’s effort to reconsider Wells’s entire oeuvre is admirable. The difficulty of locating his writing in traditional historic and periodic categories might explain why, until now, he has been relegated to genre studies. Nevertheless, some readers may chafe at the marginalization of established modernists here. For instance, Yeats scholars are likely to be dissatisfied with the half-paragraph of treatment his work receives, wherein Cole argues that “Many of Yeats’s most powerful poems end with questions . . . and these, in leaving the reader suspended, indicate a distinctive forward-leaning temporality, hovering on the edge of the future” (157). Given that Wells’s view of time is one of Inventing Tomorrow’s main topics, a comparison of Wells and Yeats might have been more interesting to modernists had it explored the stark contrast between Wells’s linear temporality and the cyclicality of Yeats’s in “A Vision” and “The Gyres.” Despite the Great War poets’ contributions to a technologically disruptive view of the future, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, and Robert Graves (though not Wilfred Owen for some reason), receive similar short shrift. One productive approach to any misgivings readers may have about how modernism is constructed in Inventing Tomorrow, or about its elision of modernist authors, would be to put Cole’s Wells into conversation with modernists beyond those featured here. For in so doing, farther along the new path Cole has marked out, we may find a new future for modernist studies.