Before the term was invented, H. G. Wells was a “public intellectual.” For almost fifty years, until his death in 1946, through essays, journalism, speaking tours, radio broadcasts, histories, scientific romances, and even more mainstream fiction, he lectured the world on how it ought to behave and what it ought to become. He also prophetically fleshed out his visions of what the world might be if it, as it were, listened to him, and if it did not. Until his death in 2004, Warren Wagar spent his life studying Wells the public intellectual and trying to emulate him in his own futuristic studies. (He even taught a course at Binghamton University called “History of the Future.”)

H. G. Wells: Traversing Time is oddly published as part of a series dedicated to “classics of science fiction.” In it, Wagar traces what he calls Wells's habit of “traversing time” from his earliest publications (“scientific romances,” such as The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau) to the end of his life and his disillusionment with mankind. Wagar actually became fascinated with Wells as a child, a fascination that continued through college and graduate study at Yale University. He was twenty-nine when his dissertation, H. G. Wells and the World State (1961) was published, and it is still an admirable and useful examination of one of the persisting preoccupations of Wells's life. We learn all this about the author in a disarming, relaxed introduction to the present volume. What we learn in the conclusion is that Wagar has written this book in the belief that Wells's prescriptions of cures for current ills are still relevant and his vision of a radically different future is still worth pursuing, that his dystopic fears are still real, still to be dreaded and prevented if possible. In short, Wells is still useful and available as a guru.

He was certainly a guru in his day, and the book's chronological development lets us see how Wells held on to certain ideas, mutated others, and even dropped occasional ones. But for a book written by a devotee in an attempt to induce a new generation to regard Wells as a guru, Wagar is disarmingly frank and judgmental. All Wells's inconsistencies are pointed out, as are his peccadilloes. Here I do not mean Wells's well-known sexual exploits but rather his occasional slips into the easy racism of his day, his flirtations with eugenics, and his jingoistic behavior during the beginning days of the Great War. And while he has a charming footnote defending Wells against the charge of misogyny in sexual relations, his defense of Wells as a feminist is extraordinarily weak. Wells was one of the first to point out that the Fabian-style feminism of suffrage did not meaningfully address the real problems of working-class women.

So Wagar's book is useful as a guide to Wells's thought. It also lays claim to being a history and an exercise in literary criticism. In the latter case, perhaps only a partial claim since Wagar is quick to claim that he is an intellectual historian, not a literary critic. But the demands of space—Wells wrote a lot of fiction—only require a literary historian capable of making offhand and occasional critical judgments, and Wagar, not surprisingly, is up to the task—at least in dealing with the texts themselves. But when he sadly but “frankly” admits that he does not expect that Wells's literary reputation will ever be reestablished, he underestimates the ability of critical fashions to turn on a dime and also shows himself to be unaware of what is going on in English departments these days, where all sorts of writers are being recuperated for their gender and/or cultural significance. Furthermore, he should have considered that Wells might very well be a writer like Rudyard Kipling, who was disdained throughout the twentieth century but nevertheless managed to attract admiring attention from T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and, more recently, Edward Said. Certainly the critical attention to Wells does not abate, and, as in the case of Kipling, many critics apparently must have their say.

But the more vexing question is how much of the work is really history. There is little contextualization of Wells's ideas and few attempts to deal with the immediate popularity or lack thereof of individual ideas. So we get very little sense of who among other thinkers of the time latched onto Wells's latest rumination or proposal and found themselves sympathetic, or which of his ideas had real-world effects. (To use a bizarre, sensational, and yet germane example, which Wagar does supply unsensationally, Leo Szilard got the idea for the atomic bomb after reading Wells's 1914 novel The World Set Free, in which Wells, sure enough, has a nuclear device.) Once he became well known, Wells was constantly approached by editors for journalistic essays. And he often complied. Wagar is more familiar with this side of Wells's oeuvre than anyone else, but he does not employ his knowledge here. Surely the frequency with which Wells is able to publish pieces on the same topic or scheme is some indication of popular interest.

At least the work is superficially historical in that its pursuit of Wells's ideas is basically chronological. The alternative would be a more thematic development. But between chronology and thematics, the material to be dealt with does not suggest a clear winner.

At a time when “metropolitan centers” are disdained, Wells's one-worldism is too cosmopolitan, too unsympathetic to local cultures or democratic values to attract a significant following. But for one anyone interested in the ideas of one of the twentieth century's great scientific progressives and scientific popularizers, Wagar's study fills the bill. And its style reveals just enough of the author's enthusiasm and quirkiness to add a welcome touch.