Seventy years after his death, it is hard to find a contemporary author who embraces the future as imaginatively as Wells did
At some point in the 1980s, mainstream culture gave up on the future. Now, all we get are dystopias, environmental catastrophes or zombie apocalypses. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead, there is no need even to explain the reason for civilisation’s downfall. The coming collapse has been so thoroughly internalised that it no longer needs to be justified. The closest recent mainstream attempt at imagining a utopia is in Iain M Banks’s Culture novels, but Banks’s post-scarcity society is alien and not the future of mankind.
What would HG Wells, who died 70 years ago and was born 150 years ago next month, make of all this? His first novel, The Time Machine, was published in 1895, and he saw the coming century clearer than anyone else. He anticipated wars in the air, the sexual revolution, motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs and a proto-Wikipedia he called the “world brain”. He foresaw world wars creating a federalised Europe. Britain, he thought, would not fit comfortably in this New Europe and would identify more with the US and other English-speaking countries. In his novel The World Set Free, he imagined an “atomic bomb” of terrifying power that would be dropped from aeroplanes. This was an extraordinary insight for an author writing in 1913, and it made a deep impression on Winston Churchill.
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