De Metawetenschap van H.G. Wells

Abstract

The Metascience of H.G. Wells H.G. Wells (1866-1946) is widely known today for his science fiction, but he was massively active in many other areas as well. This essay reviews his most important nonfiction writings and related activities, and argues that these too combined science and literature. The focus is on Wells' writing of popular surveys of history, biology and economics, his campaigns for educational reform, and his political actions. In all of these endeavours Wells promoted a scientific worldview that did away with what he saw as the irrationality of existing politics, especially the tribal mentality that caused war between the nation-states. Wells believed that the continuous compilation and distribution of scientific knowledge (the most important conduit of which was a so-called 'World Encyclopaedia') would gradually lead mankind to a scientifically-run world state. Hence, both the form of his nonfiction (writings about science) and the means by which his ideals would be realized (circulating scientific texts) were scientific as well as literary. As such, I argue, they constituted a new literary genre. Neither fictional nor scientific nor popularizing in the conventional sense, this part of Wells' work chiefly aimed to convey the social significance of scientific approaches, and can therefore best be characterized as 'metascience'.