Novel: The Shape of Things to Come

Overview

H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come is a panoramic future history that traces humanity’s trajectory from the early 1930s through the next two centuries, moving from economic malaise and geopolitical rivalry to collapse, technocratic revolution, and the steady construction of a rational World State. Rather than unfolding as a character-driven novel, it assembles a chronicle of events, ideas, and institutional shifts, offering a sweeping vision of how modernity’s crises might break and be remade by scientific organization and global planning.

Framing Device

The narrative is presented as an edited digest of the dream-notes of Dr. Philip Raven, a scholar-bureaucrat associated with the League of Nations who repeatedly envisions the future in detailed episodes. Wells poses as the collator of Raven’s manuscript, granting the text a documentary gravitas while allowing it to move freely across decades and continents. The device legitimizes both the chronicle’s prophetic tone and its analytic, quasi-historical method.

Breakdown and World War

From 1933 through the 1940s, the book projects a deepening global depression, the paralysis of the League, and the rise of aggressive nationalisms unable to manage industrial society. A second world war erupts, spreads across Europe and Asia, and degenerates into prolonged aerial bombardment, blockades, and the tactical use of gas. Amid the privation and dislocation, a devastating pandemic known as the wandering sickness rends social fabrics and accelerates demographic collapse. State capacities erode, currencies fail, and communications falter as the prolonged conflict becomes a grinding, atomizing disaster.

Interregnum of Bosses and Decay

With national governments moribund, the mid-century becomes a patchwork of local strongmen and improvised authorities ruling ruined regions. Trade shrinks to barter, intellectual life is marginalized, and scientific practice persists only in isolated enclaves that can keep machinery running. The book lingers on the human cost: famine, migration, and the degradation of civic habits. Yet these scattered technical communities, and especially networks of airmen and engineers, preserve the practical knowledge that will make reconstruction possible.

Rise of the Air Dictatorship

Out of this chaos emerges a transnational technical movement that seizes the remaining arteries of modernity, air and sea transport, power stations, mines, and communication hubs. Styling itself a provisional authority over movement and energy, it disarms warlords from above, imposes a universal truce, and suppresses nationalist and sectarian revivals. Often called the Air Dictatorship, this regime is austere, secular, and reformist: it standardizes education, expands public health, normalizes birth control, curbs private sovereignty, and replaces competitive finance with coordinated resource accounting. Resistance flares in traditionalist strongholds, but the new order uses overwhelming mobility and nonlethal technologies to end insurrections quickly and prevent relapse into civil war.

Consolidation into the World State

As transport and production revive, the directorate evolves into a federated World State committed to planning and the free circulation of knowledge. Tariffs and armaments vanish, borders become administrative conveniences, and languages and measures are rationalized. A global curriculum and encyclopedia cultivate common understanding. Cities are rebuilt for health and efficiency; women’s emancipation and the socialization of child welfare become pillars; culture reorients from possessive individualism to service, invention, and exploratory play. The World Pax is not static; it is a moving equilibrium that steadily widens the sphere of foresight and consent.

Horizon and Purpose

By the late twenty-first century, the narrative sees an educated species managing growth, channeling invention, and contemplating ventures beyond Earth and beyond the traditional limits of lifespan. The book’s purpose is programmatic as much as descriptive: it argues that catastrophe is the near-term consequence of uncoordinated nationalism, and that recovery requires an explicit alliance of scientists, engineers, and educators to found a cosmopolitan commonwealth. The protagonist is not an individual but the collective intelligence of humanity learning to govern itself through knowledge, coordination, and a deliberately constructed world civilization.