The Shape of Things to Come

Abstract

‘In this newly built Spade House I began a book Anticipations which can be considered as the keystone to the main arch of my work. That arch rises naturally from my first creative imaginations, “The Man of the Year Million” (written first in 1887) and “The Chronic Argonauts” (in the Science Schools Journal, 1888), and it leads on by a logical development to The Shape of Things to Come (1933)….’³⁰ This book, which Wells acknowledged was ‘as deliberate and laborious a piece of work as anything I have ever done’, is one of his most ambitious works. Cast in the form of a history of the world from 1929 to 2105, The Shape of Things to Come sets out to describe his matured theory of world renaissance through an open conspiracy of enlightened revolutionaries. In it he made use of a number of ideas he had previously introduced both in his fiction and in his sociological writings; it is his most comprehensive statement of world revolution.