Abstract
George Orwell is not alone in believing " thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation… The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. " 1 One important subset: 20 th century science fiction writers inspired by Wells's early scientific romances to explore and to satirize not merely new technologies, but also evolving orientations towards scientific knowledge. Wells has a reputation as a romancer, a technological enthusiast, a utopian. Inseparable from all this, though, is a quality most evident in his early works—a ruthlessly satirical view of human aspiration and human arrogance. Writers who followed Wells were profoundly shaped by his marvelous powers of volte-face, switching directions so rapidly that scientific breakthroughs that had seemed pure genius stood also revealed as narcissistic or megalomaniacal. That Wells impulse to ridicule humanity's pettiness-its attachment to distinctions, advancement and the comfort of one's own family—can make scientific innovation itself seem little more than petty preening and self-advancement. However, the jovial silliness of those who emulated Wells rather than simply aping him 2 also helps them ask unexpected questions about human agency and significance within an indifferent universe. In fact, a Wells-inflected Menippean satirical tradition—a combination of high seriousness and low adventure-lies at the core of the vigorous and sometimes misunderstood genre of SF, which Wells turbo-charged at a crucial moment when scientific prestige began meteorically ascending to its present position of cultural dominance, 3 I am at work on a genealogy of anti-anthropocentric satire within science fiction, tentatively titled Laughter is from Mars. That word satire is tricky, generally sending scholars careening down one of two very different roads. First road: one can read satire as