Between the wars

In Prague, Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1920) gave the world the word robot (from the Czech robota, forced labour; the coinage was suggested by his brother Josef). Čapek was a liberal humanist and anti-fascist who died weeks after Munich with a Gestapo arrest warrant already drafted for him. He knew what his artificial workers stood for: a class manufactured to be exploited, and the reckoning that follows.

In revolutionary Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin — an old Bolshevik turned heretic who argued that it was always heresy that drove human progress — completed We in 1921, the first great modern dystopia. It depicts a glass city of numbered citizens ruled by a Benefactor, where imagination is a disease to be surgically removed. The Soviet censors banned it and it circulated abroad. In 1946 a Tribune book review by one George Orwell brought it to English readers’ attention. Its influence on Orwell will be evident later in this tour.

Bloomsbury Group novelist E. M. Forster served as president of the Cambridge Humanists and on the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association (today’s Humanists UK). His essay ‘What I Believe’ (1938), with its preference for ‘tolerance, good temper and sympathy’ over creeds, remains one of the finest short statements of the humanist temperament.

In 1909 he published a single, uncanny science fiction story. ‘The Machine Stops’ imagines humanity living underground in individual cells, communicating through screens, worshipping the global Machine that sustains them, and gradually losing the capacity for direct experience. A gay humanist who prized personal relations above systems, Forster wrote the story as a rebuke to H. G. Wells’ brand of techno-optimism, worrying that technology which promised connection might instead deliver isolation. Today it looks uncomfortably prophetic about the lonelier corners of the internet and the wider phenomenon of digital isolation.

Olaf Stapledon, an agnostic philosopher who lectured for the Workers’ Educational Association, wrote on a scale nobody has matched since. Last and First Men (1930) narrated the next two billion years of the human species. His Star Maker (1937) toured the evolution of the whole cosmos, treating its creator-figure as an artist to be judged rather than a god to be worshipped. He was deeply admired by the American scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan, and Stapledon’s influence is evident in the ‘cosmic perspective’ Sagan later made famous.

The same decades saw the genre taken up by those whom official society excluded. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American freethinker whose His Religion and Hers (1923) argued that death-fixated, patriarchal religion should give way to an ethic centred on life and its cultivation. Her serialised novel Herland (1915) offers a feminist utopia in which women have built a rational, cooperative society and greet their male ‘discoverers’ with polite, devastating questions about how things are done back home.

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American freethinker, sociologist, and a co-founder of the NAACP who in 1911 had served alongside Felix Adler as a secretary to the First Universal Races Congress in London, convened by the Union of Ethical Societies (Humanists UK). He included in Darkwater (1920) a short story called ‘The Comet’, in which a catastrophe leaves a black man and a white woman as, apparently, the last people in New York. For a suspended moment the colour line vanishes along with everyone else; then the world returns, and the line snaps back into place. It is a founding text of what we now call ‘Afrofuturism’, and an early demonstration of speculative fiction working as sociology: change one variable, and see which of society’s ‘natural’ hierarchies survive.