I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange.
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I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange.
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When I first picked up this book I thought it was going to be an apocalyptic novel. I assumed a comet hitting the earth would wreak devastation. It turned out to be a utopian novel. The comet is not a solid mass, as we know comets to be, but rather a ball of gas. This gas changes the nature of earth's atmosphere and thereby the nature of humanity. Most of the book concerns the lead character's search for revenge against the girl who jilted him. After the comet strike all such negative emotions as anger, fear, jealousy and hatred are eliminated from the human psyche. The remainder of the book is about how the narrator finds peace and happiness. There is an odd prologue in which Wells seems to be having a vision of an old man writing the story. Then there is an epilogue in which Wells is a bit taken aback at just how different the utopia is from our reality.