The Shape of Things to Come
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. ix, [1], 431, [7] pages. Footnotes. Some, discoloration inside boards and flyleaves. Boards somewhat scratched, some wear to board corners and spine edges. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction". A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption – dubbed “Wells's law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by British writer H. G. Wells, published in 1933. It takes the form of a future history which ends in 2106. A long economic slump causes a major war that leaves Europe devastated and threatened by plague. In decades of chaos with much of the world reverting to medieval conditions, pilots and technicians formerly serving in various nations' air-forces maintain a network of functioning air fields. Around this nucleus, technological civilization is rebuilt, with the pilots and other skilled technicians eventually seizing world-wide power and sweeping away the remnants of the old nation states. A benevolent dictatorship is set up, paving the way for world peace by abolishing national divisions, enforcing the English language, promoting scientific learning and outlawing religion. The enlightened world-citizens are able to depose the dictators peacefully, and go on to breed a new race of super-talents, able to maintain a permanent utopia. The book displays one of the earliest uses of the abbreviation "C.E.", which Wells explains as "Christian Era" but it is now more usually understood as "Common Era". A number Wells' short-term predictions would come true, such as the aerial bombing of whole cities presented in more detail than in his previous The War in the Air and the eventual development of weapons of mass destruction. Theodore Wein pointed out that "Wells' Things to Come was at its most influential in the six years between its publication and the moment when the course of its predicted war was overtaken and overshadowed by the actual fast-unfolding events of the Second World War. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Future Studies, Forecast, Futurism, Science Fiction, Armaments, Revolution, World War, Versailles, Germs, Insurrection, Ariston Theotocopulos, Megeve, Basra, Resistance
[Book #83229]
Price: $100.00