Star Begotten by HG Wells is one of those novels that you rarely see. The science fiction people tend towards the early stuff: The Time Machine, Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, while the sociological types prefer the later books like Men Like Gods, The Sleeper Wakes, and The World Set Free. Lastly, the literary types ignore the SF altogether (write it off as a passing phase) and focus on the novels like Wheels of Chance, Ann Veronica, or The Secret Places of the Heart. I can honestly say I am not any of these. I am a monster fan. And Star Begotten is an interesting book to me.
Star Begotten was written in 1937, nine years before Wells’ death. Wells’ reputation by this time was not what it was in 1898 or even 1915. By the late 1920s, he was reprinting his glory days in pulps like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. He must have seemed pretty old fashioned to many. George Orwell described him as being too sane for the mad world of the 20th Century. With the events of the Russian Revolution and afterwards, his socialist ideas were becoming unpopular. (He does address this and many others things in the novel.) I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Star Begotten came and went, only to be resurrected by Manor Books during the 1970s SF paperback boom. (This is the edition I keep encountering in second-hand stores.)
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2017/08/star-begotten-monstrous-rebuttle-guest.html
I’ll have to find this one. Thanks