An Enchanted World

seems to have ranked high among Wells’s literary effects. His description of Kipps as replete with humor and subtle observations could easily refer to many of his works. Strange, hard-to-interpret humor permeates Wells’s short fiction and erupts even in such “horror” romances as The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau, where we might least expect it. Wells’s disorienting humor makes a lasting impression, at least in my experience of reading him. It tends to inflect an equivocal tone that blurs any easy distinction between what should or should not be taken seriously. Although James mentions variations in tone in The Wheels of Chance, he misses an opportunity to highlight Wells’s humor as another decentering and unsettling device designed to open his readers to the possibility of reevaluating the established social order. But this is a minor oversight in Maps of Utopia, a rewarding study of Wells’s didactic narrative techniques.