"In the Days of the Comet"

1905-06 Wells, H[erbert] G[eorge] (1866-1946). “In the Days of the Comet.” Cosmopolitan Magazine 40 - 41 (December 1905 - October 1906): 188-98, 262-73, 441-56, 576-90, 697-711; 39-48, 207-19, 319-30, 429-41, 536-44, 647-54. Repub. London: Macmillan and Co., 1906. Also published in The Daily Chronicle, nos. 13,725 - 13,756 (February 20 - March 29, 1906). All installments appear on page 8 except No. 13,746 (March 16): 10. Rpt. in The Works of H.G. Wells Atlantic Edition. Volume X In the Days of the Comet and Seventeen Short Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 9-319. The Atlantic Edition is generally considered the best text of Wells’s works. Also rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. The first two sections of Chapter 6 “The Change” are rpt. in The New Improved Sun: An Anthology of Utopian S-F. Ed. Thomas M[ichael] Disch (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 202-08 with an editor’s note on 201. L, L(NL)

Eutopia. Something in the tail of a comet changes all human beings, freeing them from greed, power, and all baser passions. In response, all housing is rebuilt, private property disappears, and human relations are established on a firmer basis. Most of the novel is concerned with the problems of the old society. There is a significant focus on love and sex both in initial descriptions of the bad old world and in contrasts between it and the new world that develops after the passing of the comet. See 2017 Roberts for a sequel.