Month: April 2022

H. G. Wells’s ‘Short History of the World’

A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells, with updates by G. P. Wells and Raymond Postgate. Penguin Books, 1965 [Original version 1922]. 363 pages.

(A quick search indicates that the version I discuss here is no longer in print. The link above is to a reprint of the original version of this book.)

Nowadays, we mostly remember H. G. Wells as a pioneer of science fiction, but in his own day, he was better known for his nonfiction. Although he had no remarkable academic credentials, he was a prolific writer and a bold thinker, and he set England abuzz with often outrageous ideas, which changed constantly. A few years ago, I happened upon a volume of his Short History of the World, which is his second attempt at summarizing world history, the first and longer being the Outline of History. I finally sat down to read it recently and might as well offer my thoughts.

Wells opens the book by assuring us that this will be a dispassionate review of the history of the world with no personal editorializing, but anyone with a passing knowledge of Wells probably knows that refraining from editorializing was something of which he was incapable, so this is very much a vision of world history through the eyes of its particular author. But Wells is a difficult man to pin down because his ideas changed from year to year: Right at the turn of the century, he advocated the genocide of all non-white races, but a handful of years later, he was reading Booker T. Washington and expressing sympathy for the plight of the American negro. He liked eugenics one minute and later rejected it. He was a member of the Fabian Society but got kicked out when he argued in favor of polygamy. G. K. Chesterton gives Wells some backhanded compliments in his book Heretics, describing him as always growing—but it’s unclear if he was really growing or simply throwing ideas against a wall to see what would stick.

If Wells had any consistent principles, they were his atheism and his belief in the goodness and inevitability of a future worldwide government. The latter appears to have been his guiding light throughout his intellectual life and the reason why he was mostly a socialist and at times (maybe) a fascist. We may take this as his religious belief, something he clung to despite all obstacles and evidence to the contrary. It is remarkable that he could study history as he did and still believe in some far-off utopia: His portrayal of the past is a catalog of folly and duplicity, yet he continued to believe that this foolish animal called man would in the future produce global unity. Therefore, despite his atheism and malleability, we may say that he was a man of deep faith.

Continue reading “H. G. Wells’s ‘Short History of the World’”

Assorted Updates

Happy Easter.

A lot is happening in the Davidson household. The little magical girl is now fifteen months old. As is typical for a girl her age, she’s hit a sleep regression. She is having trouble getting to sleep at night and can’t handle being in her crib by herself, which is putting some strain on both her mother and me. My wife is a nurse and works nights; previously, when she worked, I could put the baby to bed and then write late into the evening, but now that the baby is fighting bedtime, I’m struggling to find time for other things I need to do. I’m attempting to rearrange my schedule to write early in the morning … but the baby wakes up really early to demand milk and cuddles, and then she won’t go back to sleep. I usually end up holding her until my wife gets home, and then I don’t even get breakfast before I have to rush to work.

So it goes.

My parents-in-law have been here for a while and have been a huge help with the baby, but they’re heading back to the Philippines now, which means I need to up my game. I’m trying to figure out a system to write and watch the baby simultaneously; the problem is, I can’t write in her presence because she wants to bang on my keyboard and has a tantrum if I don’t let her. I could potentially block her off so she’s in the room with me but can’t reach the computer, but that will make her cry.

On another first-time-parent, first-time-homeowner front, we’re working on the house. We’re putting in a garden and planning to plant fruit trees in the back. Also, we’re going to plant hedges in the front because the direction of the wind and location of the house cause a lot of trash to blow into our front yard. I figure, if we have hedges, the trash can pile up against them on the street instead of scattering across our grass. We’re moving slowly on all this because budgeting is tight, but we’re moving.

Also, it appears a vole has destroyed part of our sprinkler system. After reading some articles online, I suggested to my wife that I might be able to repair it myself, but she gave me “the look” and told me to call somebody instead.

And although this isn’t the highest priority, I want to put one of those miniature free libraries in the front yard. Having retired from archaeology, I work as a librarian, so passing out books to others is a mtter of principle for me. I don’t want to be officially associated with the organization called Little Free Library for the same reason I refuse to join the American Library Association despite official pressure: Because those guys are assholes. Nonetheless, I’ve always liked those miniature libraries, and I think there’s only one other in town at the moment, so I’d like to host the second. When I finally get it set up, I’m going to fill it with books that are edifying but not too demanding, such as Mortimer J. Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody and H. G. Wells’s Short History of the World.

I have plans to DIY our guest room after the grandparents head out. It may turn into a disaster, but it will at least be a disaster contained to one area of the house. Our house has an atrocious interior texture, and the walls were abused by previous occupants who didn’t understand the concept of stud-finding and thus ripped holes in the sheetrock that were then hastily patched. So I intend to try my hand at skim-coating. Some DIY sites online claim, no doubt falsely, that it’s super easy with the right tools, so I’m going to give it a shot, and if I destroy a room, at least I will have only destroyed one room. But if I succeed, that means I can go on to do the other rooms. The plan is, rip out the carpet, skim-coat the walls, apply new texture (orange peel, probably, because it’s easy and looks okay and comes in cans), and put down a floating floor. If that works out, I’ll move on to other rooms to do the same thing.

I have some ambitions that are beyond my skill level, such as a built-in bench for the dining area and built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases for my office, which would be extra cool because the office has high ceilings. These projects would, at the least, require tools I don’t currently own and can’t presently afford.

On a more serious note, my computer desperately needs replacing. One thing slowing down my writing is that I simply don’t know if my machine will cooperate with me when I turn it on. Sometimes it boots up fine. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes. Sometimes my word processor crashes unexpectedly or slows down the computer to a crawl. Sometimes I think I can squeeze in a little time to write but actually can’t because the computer is too slow. This computer is now over a decade old, well past its life expectancy. As with everything else, this is a budget item for which there are no funds. But I have been expecting for years now that this thing will simply one day fail to turn on when I press the power button, and although that still hasn’t happened, it is fast approaching.

I have yet another item that is halfway between a hobby project and a religious devotion. I am a fanatical Bible annotator. My notes are a stream of consciousness consisting of points from sermons and my own thoughts but mostly snippets from books and articles I’ve read, with quotes ranging from Jules Verne to Bertrand Russell to the Bhagavad Gita as well as a slew of archaeological journals. I’ve been through three different study Bibles over my lifetime, and I am almost finished copying my notes from the previous two into the third one. That third one is a first edition, in leather, of the Harper Collins Study Bible, and it is getting worn out, so I am seriously considering copying all of my notes, a project that would literally take years, into a new, fourth study Bible.

To that end, I recently acquired, for an embarrassing amount of money, a rare leatherbound edition of the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, a volume I have coveted for a long time. But after examining it and finding it dissatisfactory in some ways (poor binding and narrow margins mostly, but also the annotations are obnoxious), I think I am likely to settle for the fifth edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which I also acquired recently. The New Oxford is horrid in many respects but is also the only “ecumenical” study Bible that updates regularly, is designed for personal annotations, and is printed by a company that actually gives a darn how the product looks.

I anticipate that the fifth edition will be the last version of the New Oxford that is actually useable. All of the Bibles I just mentionend use the New Revised Standard Version, which is an offense to the ears that wreaks havoc on the texts it pretends to translate, but it is the only English version, unfortunately, that includes all the books used by the Eastern Orthodox and some prominent lesser Eastern Churches. A new version of the NRSV is forthcoming, which promises to be worse than the current one; the current NRSV I can fix with a red pen, but the new version will be beyond saving. I expect that the sixth edition of the New Oxford, whenever it appears, will use this newer version, so that means the fifth edition is the last “ecumenical” study Bible that will not be worthless. For that reason, I expect it will be the last study Bible I buy and may be the one into which I copy all my notes to create my own personal “definitive” edition. The New Oxford lacks features that anything calling itself a study Bible ought to have, such as a cross-referencing system and a concordance, and its formatting is horrendous, but it is, sadly, the best thing available in its niche and is likely to remain so.

On the writing front, I have two projects. I am working on a collection of Rags and Muffin short stories, though this has proven difficult: Although I’ve been editing, formatting, and promoting Rags and Muffin, actually writing and living in their world isn’t something I’ve done for some time, so it’s hard to get back into. I’m also moving ahead with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. I was having some difficulty with the plotting of that book, but I’ve recently found the solution. Finding the time to write, however—and getting my computer to cooperate—are other matters.

The Pulps: ‘The Torture Pool’

As proof that the pulps are not lightly dismissed, we have a story by MacKinlay Kantor, who later won a Pulitzer for his novel Andersonville. This collection presents his story “The Torture Pool,” which appeared in 1932 in Detective Ficiton Weekly.

Despite the (evetual) credentials of its author, this story returns us to the general status of this collection: Solid, workmanlike, competent, and somewhat forgettable. The last story stood out because it was outrageous. This story, although one of the better ones in the mystery section, is not so outlandishly entertaining.

The story follows a man who runs gift shop in a small, out-of-the-way town that happens to be a tourist spot. His brother had been a hermit who’d amassed a small but respectable fortune through meager living and selling wild herbs, and he had, five years previous, been found dead, apparently killed for his money.

“The Torture Pool” is notable mostly for its atmosphere, capturing as it does the sun-drenched and swampy backwater in which it takes place. Unfortunately, it lacks tension: It follows a cold case, and the killer’s identity is obvious from the beginning. In fact, the story is not about finding out whodunnit but about the protagonist, who already knows whodunnit, finding a creative way to force the killer to confess (the “torture pool” of the title is a pool of quicksand). The climax is a little contrived, but the extensive cultural and environmental details make it engrossing.