In The Days of The Comet - Utopia and Dystopia

Utopia and Dystopia

The pre-Change world is often described as dark, corrupt, spoiled, unjust, and ugly. Politicians do little for those living in squalid conditions. Book I, Chapter 3, Section 4 includes a diatribe against the institution of war, "certainly the most strikingly insane" of "all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time." All this is ended forever in three hours by the comet's green vapors, and all see themselves and the world differently.

Hate, distrust, and selfishness are eliminated after the Change, and individuals regard their previous existences with shameful incomprehension. Many things become useless or meaningless: ownership titles, political institutions, nations, many industries, armies, and many weapons. In Book III, Chapter 3, Wells presents an extensive satire of the British Cabinet. After the Change, larger buildings begin to be used as collective dining halls, and the mansions of the wealthy are converted to nursing homes. A makeshift engineer's school reeducates people, and there is extensive demolition and destruction of structures and objects from the past.

William Leadford argues for open marriage and polyamory, though he does not use those terms. But H. G. Wells distances himself from these highly controversial and, at the time, socially unacceptable notions by having another narrator, implicitly himself, half-censure them in the epilogue.