The Shape of Things to Come

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For other uses, see Shape of Things to Come (disambiguation).

The Shape of Things to Come
Macmillan
(US)
Publication date
September 1933
Media typePrint

The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by the British writer H. G. Wells. Published in 1933, it takes the form of a future history that ends in 2106.

Synopsis

A long economic slump causes a major war that leaves

medieval conditions. Pilots and technicians that formerly served in various nations' air forces maintain a network of functioning airfields. Around this nucleus, technological civilization is rebuilt, with the pilots and other skilled technicians eventually seizing worldwide 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.

Analysis

Overview

Though his story is a work of fiction, several of Wells' short-term predictions from Shape would come true, such as the

withering of state-power and the dissolution of Islam
, have not come to pass.

A

rearmament, cause the worldwide economic crisis
to continue for thirty years, concurrently with a Second World War - a war fought between countries already on the verge of economic collapse, which is hastened by the war.

Wells' Second World War breaks out in January 1940 with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a violent clash between Germans and Poles at

France and the Soviet Union are only marginally involved. The United Kingdom remains neutral and the United States fights with Japan to indecisive effect on both sides. The Austrian Anschluss happens during, rather than before, the war. Czechoslovakia avoids German occupation. Its President, Edvard Beneš
, survives to initiate the final Suspension of Hostilities in 1950.

Wells' prediction was off the mark with regard to

Unter Den Linden closely predicted its actual fate in the war. However, Wells wrongly thought that land fighting would quickly bog down, as in World War I, and that tanks
would prove completely ineffective.

In Wells' future,

weapons of mass destruction. This enables nations to threaten the destruction of places halfway around the world. This would not come true in World War II
, but instead in later decades.

The Second World War ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of both involved and neutral countries, all affected by the deepening economic crisis. Nearly all governments break down, and a devastating plague in 1956 and 1957 kills a large part of humanity. Civilization nearly ends.

A benevolent dictatorship, the Dictatorship of the Air, arises from the controllers of the world's surviving transport systems, who are the only people with global power. The dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca and eradicates all religions, setting the world on the road to a utopia. When the dictatorship chooses to execute a subject, the condemned is given a chance to take a poison tablet modeled on the hemlock given to Socrates.

The achievement of a

upward social mobility
, leaving a humanity entirely composed of "middle class intellectuals". The limited amount of physical labor still needed is performed by the world's youth, who undergo two years of "labor conscription" instead of military conscription, which is no longer needed.

After around a hundred years, the Dictatorship of the Air is overthrown in a bloodless

coup. The former rulers are sent into honorable retirement and the world state "withers away". The last part of the book details the utopian world that emerges. The aim of this utopian world is to produce a world society made up entirely of polymaths
, every one of its members being the intellectual equal of the greatest geniuses of the past.

Suppression of religion

A major aspect of the creation of the World State is the abolition of all organized religion, a step deemed indispensable to giving the emerging "Modern State" a monopoly over education and the complete ability to mold new generations of humanity.

The abolition of

Islamic Republic of Iran came into being".[1]
Wells's speculations, which may well seem absurd from a more modern point of view, can be much better understood under the impression of the establishment and attempted suppression of Islam in
Atatürk
in the 1920s and 1930s.

There is only a brief reference to the abolition of Buddhism and no reference to any serious problems encountered by the Modern State in eradicating it from East Asia.

The most prolonged and formidable religious opposition envisaged by Wells is from the

Fascist Italy. After the Catholic Church is decisively crushed in Italy, it finds refuge in Ireland, "the last bastion of Christianity". When it is subdued there also, the resistance is maintained only in Latin America, under "a coloured Pope in Pernambuco
". This too is suppressed.

Wells gives considerable attention to the fate of the

kosher butcheries still in operation, while the opening act of the "Federated Nationalist" rebels opposing the Modern 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. The Jews, who had resisted earlier pressures, become absorbed in the general society and lose their separate identity.

Democracy, fascism and communism

In the 1930s, especially after the collapse of the

The Principle of Opposition
", which by definition rules out parliamentary democracy.

Wells's future history remembers

Italian Fascism
is easily swept away by the triumphant Modern State. The book notes that many people who were Fascists or Nazis in their early years had become staunch adherents of the Modern State in the more mature part of their lives.

The future remembers

Stalin as narrow and limited but not as a bloody dictator. The Soviet Union is less affected than other countries by the chaos of the late 1940s and the 1950s. With the rise of the Modern State, Russia has a bloodless takeover by the pilots and other skilled technicians, who displace the Communist Party bureaucrats. It assimilates into the new worldwide state. During the transition, the hammer and sickle
are displayed side by side with the Modern State's Winged Disk.

Altogether, of the three competing systems of government (democracy, fascism and communism), only the last would be remembered by Wells's Modern State as having been a predecessor.

The Death of Socrates

When the Modern State finds it necessary to sentence people to death, the condemned person is given a lethal "tabloid" and is allowed to choose the moment and the location for taking it. Death by the tabloid is instantaneous and painless. Though not explicitly mentioned, this aspect of Wells' vision of the future was clearly inspired by the well-known episode of the end of the philosopher Socrates, who - when condemned to death in ancient Athens - took Hemlock and died, surrounded by his friends and discoursing of philosophy to his last moment.

Use of "C.E."

The book displays one of the earliest uses of the label "C.E." on calendar years in place of the more common

Christian Era", but in common parlance, the abbreviation is now more usually understood to mean "Common Era".[2]

Relation to Brave New World

As noted by Nathaniel Ward,[3] The Shape of Things to Come was published two years after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In both works, a war leaves the world in ruins, a self-appointed elite takes over, rebuilds the world and engages in social engineering to refashion human society. Wells notes that as Huxley, "one of the most brilliant of the reactionary writers, foretold of them, [the leaders of the Dictatorship of the Air] tidied up the world".

The crucial difference is the society envisioned by Huxley is highly hierarchical, with intelligent "Alphas" on top and moronic "Epsilons" at the bottom, Huxley arguing that a society composed purely of the assertive and competitive "Alphas" would dissolve into chaos and all-out fighting. It was that vision that Wells believed would cause Huxley to be remembered by posterity as a "reactionary writer". Much of Shape of Things to Come is devoted to demonstrating that given time, an elite with control of world education can make such a society of intelligent and assertive "Alphas" harmonious and functional, without an underclass.

Adaptations

Wells loosely adapted the novel into a screenplay entitled Things to Come. Produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, the film was released in 1936. It also takes elements from Wells's non-fiction book The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931).

H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a low-budget Canadian space opera first released in May 1979, presented itself as a sequel and adaptation. Apart from the name of two characters named "Caball" (named after Cabal in the film Things to Come), it has no connection with the film or book.[4]

The audio drama production Big Finish Productions released a 2017 audio adaptation based loosely on Wells' book. It was adapted by Guy Adams, starred Nicola Walker and Sam Troughton, and was directed by Lisa Bowerman. This version presented the future history as an alternative timeline which Raven is shown, versus dreams, as in the original.

Influence on later science fiction

American Golden Age writers

Theodore Wein

Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson
, and enumerated ways in which the work of all three, and less prominent SF writers, had felt the influence of Wells' work.

Specifically, Wein speculated that Wells' character of social scientist Gustave De Windt, with his blueprint for world transformation, had inspired Asimov's Hari Seldon.[6] As noted by Wein, De Windt and Seldon both conduct research at a prestigious library in the capital of a declining empire (respectively the British Empire and the Galactic Empire). Both realize that an overall collapse is imminent and inevitable, set out a detailed blueprint of how to rebuild the world/galaxy, and set up a body of dedicated followers (Wells' Modern State Society, Asimov's First and Second Foundations) which will implement the plan of the founding visionary for generations after his death. Further, Wein conjectured that Wells' "seventeen million active workers" tasked with a "Fundamental Knowledge System" containing "everything that is known" had inspired Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica.[7]

In Heinlein's "

Washington D.C., and put to naught the President's authority - an event similar to an episode earlier depicted in Wells' work. Heinlein would later upgrade the International Patrol into an Interplanetary Patrol
, a self-appointed elite of motivated and puritanical spacemen reminiscent of Wells' Dictatorship of the Air.

Wells described Federated Nationalists who had put aside their feuds, to band together until they had smashed the budding world government. Poul Anderson in his early future history, the

Psychotechnic League, had similar federated nationalists opposing the United Nations
' efforts to make itself a world government and rebuild a war torn world.

Other works

dystopian The Aerodrome (1941) is in part a fictional critique of The Shape of Things to Come. Wells' Air Police is presented as the fascistic "Airmen".[8]

References

  1. ^ Nasser, George, "The Long Tortuous and Arrogant Road to 9/11, pp. 4–5", in Wheatley, Barbara (ed.), The West and Islam, Islam and the West: Confrontation or Accommodation?
  2. ^ Wells, HG, "Introduction", The Shape of Things to Come, Project Gutenberg Australia, §1. A Chronological Note.
  3. ^ Nathaniel Ward "The visions of Wells, Huxley and Orwell - why was the Twentieth Century impressed by Distopias rather than Utopias?" in Ophelia Ruddle (ed.) Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Multidisciplinary Round Table on Twentieth Century Culture"
  4. ^ Eleanor Mannikka (2009). "The Shape of Things to Come". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 17 September 2009. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
  5. ^ Wein, Theodore, "1", HG Wells and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, p. 5,7.
  6. ^ Wein, Theodore, "3,4", HG Wells and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, p. 17,43
  7. ^ Wein, Theodore, "4", HG Wells and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, pp. 25–26
  8. ISBN 0786412194
    (p. 45)

External links
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