Word: wellsians
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...HOLY TERROR-H. G. Wells-Simon & Schuster ($2.75). Most of H. G. Wells's 80 books have pictured the shape of things to come; if nobody knows what the future holds, it is not his fault. In The Holy Terror he sees the same old Wellsian future: the final World War, a world dictatorship, and at last, off in the misty distance, the World State. Many an oldster bores mankind about the past; in The Holy Terror, Wells manages to be dull about things that have not even happened...
...good idea, but a slight story, The Thought-Reading Machine combines Wellsian fantasy and well-buttered Gallic irony, makes a pleasantly mild addition to the literature of Let-Your-Mind-Alone...
...author chose the faintly ridiculous, wildly improbable newt as the subject of his extravaganza must remain a mystery. Why he ends the book so indeterminately is easier to answer: he found he had bitten off more in the way of Wellsian fantasy than he could chew. Through the rest of the book, however, he does give about as copious a working-out of the satiric possibilities of his theme as could possibly be wished for, and while in some parts of this the creaking of the Capek brain is depressingly almost audible, in others-particularly those dealing with the grave...
Optimistic, like nearly all of H. G. Wells's books, Brynhild or The Show of Things also encouraged Wellsians by its age-belying vigor. The story of a clever man's disintegration and an honest woman's fulfillment, it is also a Wellsian fable, told without his usual blackboard charts and magic-lantern slides, of the human search for reality...
...starts this idea in your head, you don't say Pish or Tush and just turn it down; you begin to have a vague sense that somehow you have felt something-you hardly know what," he expresses what the sympathetic reader feels about such a Wellsian book as Star-Begotten. And occasionally, as a good journalist may, Wells's burbling, suggestive, enthusiastic talk strikes out a suddenly poetic phrase that rings in the memory: "With their hard, clear minds and their penetrating, unrelenting questions stinging our darkness as the stars sting...