The Shape of Things to Come
by H. G. Wells
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 book was written as a future history. In late 1933 or early 1934, US President rearmament causes the worldwide economic crisis to continue 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 its date as January 1940, quite close to the actual date of September 1939. Wells's imagined war sharply diverges from the actual war when Poland proves a military match for Germany, in an inconclusive war that lasts ten years. More countries are eventually dragged into the fighting, but France and the Soviet Union are only marginally involved, the United Kingdom 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.
Wells' prediction was widely off the mark with regard to Spain, which the book assumed would manage to stay away from the violent passions sweeping the rest of Europe. In real life, the Spanish Civil War would become the main focus of these passions, two years after the book was published. Evidently, Wells greatly overestimated the influence of Spanish Liberals such as Unamuno on Spanish society as a whole.
Wells correctly predicted that the coming war would involve both sides launching heavy bombings of each other's main cities, and his detailed depiction of the destroyed Unter Den Linden closely predicted its actual fate in the war. However, Wells wrongly assumed that land fighting would quickly bog down, as in World War I, and that the idea of using tanks to develop a war of movement would come to naught. Wells predicted that submarines would become the launching pads for "air torpedoes" (missiles) carrying weapons of mass destruction, enabling a country to threaten the destruction of places halfway around the world although that actually happened decades after World War II.
Wells' predicted war ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of all the fighting states and of the neutral countries, which are 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 civilization.
Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship, "The Dictatorship of the Air", which 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 peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship chooses to execute a subject, the condemned person is given a chance to take a poison tablet (modelled on the Hemlock given to Socrates).
The achievement of a classless society is not via a Marxist Dictatorship of the Proletariat, an idea that Wells completely rejected. Rather, the working class is massively "pulled upwards" and completely eliminated in several generations of intensive upward social mobility, in effect leaving a humanity entirely composed of "middle class intellectuals". The limited amount of physical labor still needed is performed by the world's youths, who undergo two years of "labor conscription" instead of military conscription, which is no longer needed.
Eventually, after about 100 years of reshaping humanity, the Dictatorship of the Air 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, every one of its members being 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".