Anti-utopia, Class, and Agency: “A Story of the Days to Come”

In light of Aaron Rosenberg’s recent Anthropocene reading and John Huntington’s conceptualization of anti-utopia, this essay examines Wells’s critique of class polarization. Its aim is to illuminate the contemporary significance of Wells’s scientific romances, with a particular focus on “A Story of the Days to Come.” I begin with Patricia McManus’s discussion of the class politics of dystopia, distinguishing between When the Sleeper Awakes and “A Story of the Days to Come.” Set in the same near-future London, “A Story of the Days to Come” presents a techno-utopian-cum-dystopian world in which the agency of working-class characters is structurally repressed through extremely alienated forms of labor that obscure the corporeality of the working body, along with corporeality in general. However, by revealing corporeality in the machine-body interaction through labor, on the one hand, and in the interaction of working-class characters through violence, on the other, the novella makes the working body visible and reveals that corporeality is the basis of working-class agency. Furthermore, I argue that “A Story of the Days to Come” deserves more critical attention for its stance on class issues in comparison with the early twentieth-century dystopian narratives of Orwell and Huxley.