H.G Wells, earthly and post-terrestrial futures

H.G Wells- the ‘father of science fiction- produced a wealth of works often evincing a prescient utopian imaginary and infused by an enthusiastic embrace of techno-scientific progress. Today amid the Capitalocene, Western notions of ‘progress’ are being fundamentally challenged by mounting social and ecological perturbations. This article draws on critical-posthuman and green utopian tributaries in order to examine Wells’s depiction of human-nonhuman relations and technology as a mediator of the former in a selection of his works, focusing specifically on his utopian novels A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods. The article denotes a palpable shift from a humble and cautious approach to human technological interventions in service of mastering ‘Nature’ in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, towards a hyper-optimistic embrace of human techno-scientific mastery over nature in Wells’s two utopian novels. The article reflects on the pertinence of Wells’s timely ruminations on the role of technology as a mediator of human-nature relations through a critical discussion of contemporary attempts by a global technochratic elite to mitigate Capitalocene socio-ecological breakdown via geoengineering and what I term ‘post-terrestrial escapism’. It is posited that both constitute attempts to evade ethical responsibility for ‘staying with the trouble’ of contemporary decline and building more liveable worlds with our co-terrestrials amidst the precarious present.