"[1] The novel is best known for its notion that a voluntary order of nobility known as the Samurai could effectively rule a "kinetic and not static" world state[2] so as to solve "the problem of combining progress with political stability".

[3] In his preface Wells forecasts (incorrectly) that A Modern Utopia would be the last of a series of volumes on social problems that he began in 1901 with Anticipations and that included Mankind in the Making (1903).

When their thumbprints are checked against records in "the central index housed in a vast series of buildings at or near Paris,"[15] both discover they have doubles in Utopia.

They journey to London to meet them, and the Owner of the Voice's double is a member of the Samurai, a voluntary order of nobility that rules Utopia.

[17] Researcher Michael Warren[18] noted that A Modern Utopia was never meant to be one of Wells' landmark Science Fiction works, but was a thinly disguised sociological and philosophical essay.

Placing his Utopia in an Alternate History was simply a plot device forced upon him since the world was already very thoroughly explored; unlike Thomas More or Jonathan Swift, Wells could not plausibly locate his Utopian society on an island or an unexplored corner of a faraway continent; there were none such.

This one-to-one correspondence was taken up by countless others, and is now taken for granted by any Alternate History fan – but it should be added to the great list of standard Science Fiction plot devices for which we are in debt to Wells' genius."

Moreover, "The historical information which Wells does provide is highly misleading," such as "The reference in Chapter 9 to "a history in which Jesus Christ had been born into a liberal and progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic Ocean to the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall."

There is no Roman Emperor reigning in Rome or Constantinople or anywhere else, nor the slightest vestige of an Imperial Administration from which this world order supposedly developed; nobody speaks Latin or any Latin-derived language except for the French language familiar from our world; there are recognizable English, French, German and Swiss people; we see a recognizable London, a recognizable Paris is mentioned though not visited, and numerous Swiss cities and towns are there, complete with famous historical landmarks which date to the Middle Ages; and in Westminster there is a kind of Parliamentary Assembly which evidently took the place of an English or British Parliament.

"[24] The narrator's double describes the ascetic Rule by which the samurai live: it includes a ban on alcohol and drugs, and a mandatory annual one-week solitary ramble in the wilderness.

It is noted that the Utopian society embarked on "a systematic world-wide attempt to destroy for ever a great number of contagious and infectious diseases."

This involved not only the elimination of rats and mice, but also – "for a time at any rate" – "a stringent suppression of the free movement of familiar animals," i.e.: "the race of cats and dogs – providing, as it does, living fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, influenza, catarrhs and the like, can retreat to sally forth again – must pass for a time out of freedom, and the filth made by horses and the other brutes of the highway vanish from the face of the earth."

It is not specified what happened to the dogs, cats and horses living in the world when this change took place and whether some of them are still preserved in a location completely segregated from human society, to be reintroduced at some future date.

The work was partly inspired by a trip to the Alps Wells made with his friend Graham Wallas, a prominent member of the Fabian Society.

[32] At a memorial service at the Royal Institution on 30 October 1946, two and a half months after Wells's death, William Beveridge read passages from the book and called it the work that had influenced him the most.

[33] According to Vincent Brome, Wells's first comprehensive biographer after his death, it was widely read by university students and "released hundreds of young people into sexual adventure.

"[34] W. Warren Wagar praised it, describing it and Wells's other utopian novels (Men Like Gods and The Shape of Things to Come) as "landmarks in that extraordinarily difficult genre.

"[35] Indeed, The Shape of Things to Come takes up many themes of the earlier book, also depicting a self-appointed elite conducting massive social engineering and remaking of the world.