The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells,
published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year
2106. In the book, a world state is established as the solution to
humanity's problems. Plot
As a frame story, Wells claims that the book is his edited version of notes
written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream
visions of a history textbook published in 2106 and wrote down what he could
remember of it. It is split into five separate sections or "books":
Today And Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration Dawns – The history of the
world up to 1933. The Days After Tomorrow: The Age of
Frustration – 1933–1960. The World Renaissance: The Birth of the
Modern State – 1960–1978. The Modern State Militant – 1978–2059.
The Modern State in Control of Life – 2059 to New Year's Day 2106.
The Shape of Things to Come was written as a future history. Seen in retrospect,
it can be considered as an alternative history, diverging from reality in late
1933 or early 1934, the point of divergence being US President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy and
Adolf Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by rearmament. Instead,
the worldwide economic crisis continues for thirty years, concurrently with the
war, as described above. Wells predicted a Second World War
breaking out with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a
violent clash between Germans and Poles at Danzig. Wells set the date for this
as January 1940. Poland proves a military match for Nazi Germany and they
engage in an inconclusive war lasting ten years. More countries are eventually
dragged into the fighting, but France and the Soviet Union are only marginally
involved, Britain remains neutral, and the United States fights inconclusively
with Japan. The Austrian Anschluss happens during, rather than before, the
war. Czechoslovakia avoids German occupation and its president, Edvard
Beneš, survives to initiate the final "Suspension of Hostilities" in 1950. The
war ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration
of all the fighting states and of the neutral countries, equally affected by
the deepening economic crisis. The whole world descends into chaos: nearly all
governments break down, and a devastating plague in 1956 and 1957
kills a large part of humanity and almost destroys civilisation.
Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship, "The Dictatorship of the
Air", arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transport systems,
who are the only people with global power. This dictatorship promotes
science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca and eradicates all
religions, setting the world on the road to a peaceful utopia. When the
dictatorship chooses to murder a subject, the condemned person is given a
chance to take a poison tablet. Eventually, after about 100 years of
reshaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless
coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the
world state "withers away". The last part of the book is a detailed
description of the utopian world that emerges. The ultimate aim of this
utopian world is to produce a world society composed entirely of polymaths,
each and every one of its members the intellectual equal of the greatest
geniuses of the past. 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".
Suppression of religions One of the major aspects of the creation
of the World State is the abolition of all organised religion—an act deemed
indispensable to give the emerging "Modern State" a monopoly over education
and the complete ability to mould new generations of humanity.
The abolition of Islam is carried out by the Air Police, who "descend upon Mecca
and close down the main holy places", apparently without major incident.
Eventually, Islam disappears, its demise accelerated by the decay of Arabic and
its replacement by "an expanded English". Some twenty mosques survive,
deemed to be worthy of preservation on architectural grounds. The
Lebanese-American scholar George Nasser remarked on this aspect of Wells' book:
"In the 1979 imagined by HG Wells, a self-appointed ruling elite composed
mainly of Westerners, with one Chinese and one Black African and not a single
Arab member, would establish itself in the Arab and Muslim city of Basra and
calmly take the decision to completely extinguish and extirpate the Muslim
religion... In the 1979 of real history, Khomeini's Islamic Republic of Iran came
into being". There is only a brief reference to the
abolition of Buddhism and no reference to any serious problem encountered by
the Modern State in eradicating it from East Asia.
The most prolonged and formidable religious opposition envisaged by Wells
is from the Catholic Church. The Pope and the entire Catholic hierarchy are
gassed unconscious when blessing the new aircraft built by a revived Fascist
Italy. After the Catholic Church is decisively crushed in Italy, it finds
refuge in Ireland, "the last bastion of Christianity". Ireland is also subdued,
and then Catholic resistance is maintained only in Latin America, under
"a coloured Pope in Pernambuco", until it too is finally put down.
Wells gives considerable attention to the fate of the Jews. In this history,
an enfeebled Nazi Germany is incapable of systematic murder on the scale of the
Holocaust. However, Jews greatly suffer from "unorganized" persecution, and
there is a reference to anti-Jewish pogroms happening "everywhere in Europe"
during the chaotic 1950s. Then, in a world where all nation-states are a
doomed anachronism, Zionism and its ambition to create a new state come to
naught. In the later struggle between the emerging world state and its
opponents, Jews are seen as caught between the hammer and the anvil.
Following the launch of its antireligious campaign, the Modern State
closes down all kosher butcheries still in operation, while the opening act of
the "Federated Nationalist" rebels opposing this state is to perpetrate a
pogrom against Jews in the Frankfurt area. Eventually, in Wells's vision, it
is the Modern State's forced assimilation that triumphs and the Jews,
who had resisted earlier such pressures, become completely absorbed in the
general society and lose their separate identity.
Film adaptations Wells loosely adapted the novel for the
screenplay of the film Things to Come, produced by Alexander Korda and directed
by William Cameron Menzies, and released in 1936. It also takes elements from
Wells's non-fiction book The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. The
film stars Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke and
Margaretta Scott. H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come
is a Canadian science fiction motion picture first released in May 1979.
Although credited to H. G. Wells, the film takes only its title and some
character names from the original source material. The film's plot has no
relationship to the events of the book. The film was an attempt to capitalise on
the popularity of such recent successes as Star Wars, and TV series such as
Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica, although the film had only a fraction of
the production budget of any of these. Influence on later science fiction
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. These same years of the 1930s
were the time of incubation for the people who were destined to become the
greatest names in Science Fiction, the time when they read ravenously any SF on
which they could lay their hands and started to formulate their own ideas. It
is not surprising that traces of Things to Come are clearly visible in what they
wrote in the 1940s and 1950s." Rex Warner's dystopian novel The
Aerodrome is partly a fictional critique of The Shape of Things to Come, with
Wells' "Air Police" transformed into the fascistic "Airmen".
Wells depicted the European social scientist Gustave De Windt sitting down
at the British Museum Library and setting out the precise blueprint for a
transformation of the world which he would not live to see.
The British Wells had the planes of the emerging World State overfly Washington,
D.C. and undermine the authority of the President of the United States. A decade
later, the American Robert Heinlein wrote "Solution Unsatisfactory" in which
planes of the International Patrol do the same. Later, Heinlein upgraded the
International Patrol into an Interplanetary Patrol, a self-appointed
elite of highly motivated and rather puritanical spacemen reminiscent of
those enforcing Wells' "Dictatorship of the Air".
Wells depicted "Federated Nationalists" who had banded together only so that
they could fly at each other's throats once they had smashed the budding world
government. Poul Anderson in his early future history, the Psychotechnic
League, depicted precisely the same kind of Nationalists violently opposing the
United Nations' efforts to make itself a true world government and rebuild the
war-torn world. In other media
"The Shape of Things To Come" by Max Frost and Troopers was a spinoff from
the 1968 film Wild in the Streets. "The Shape of Things to Come" is the
title of a track in the Battlestar Galactica Season One Soundtrack composed
by Bear McCreary. In episode 505 of the television series
The Walking Dead, Eugene is reading "The Shape of Things To Come"
An episode of the television series Lost is titled "The Shape of Things to Come".
One of the main settings in the episode is Iraq, similar to the novel.
"The Shape of Things to Come" is the last track on the Powerman 5000 album,
Transform. "The Shape of Things to Come" is the
name of a song on the Audioslave album, Revelations.
"The Shape of Things to Come" is the name of the last scene in the last
episode of the television series Caprica. This scene outlines the future
development of the Cylon machine race and why the Cylons in Battlestar
Galactica have monotheistic tendencies. "The Shape of Things to Come" is the
name of a 1979 song by The Headboys. "The Shape of Things to Come" is the
name of a song by the Books' Nick Zammuto.
"The Shape of Jazz to Come" is the name of a 1959 album by Ornette Coleman.
"The Shape of Punk to Come" is the name of a 1998 album by Refused
See also Cauldron
References External links
Full Text from Project Gutenberg