What is Coming? a Forecast of Things After the War

Written in the summer of 1914, as Europe stumbled into the bloodiest conflict the world had yet seen, H.G. Wells turned his formidable predictive gifts toward a different question: what happens after the killing stops? The author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds applies his scientific imagination to prophecy, attempting to trace the political, social, and technological landscape that would emerge from the war's ashes. Wells writes as a rationalist prophet, rejecting mysticism in favor of what he calls 'scientific reasoning' - believing that careful analysis of present trends could illuminate the future. What unfolds is a remarkable historical document. Wells anticipates some developments correctly - the rise of American influence, the collapse of empires, the intensification of technology in warfare. Yet he misses profoundly too, unable to foresee the Russian Revolution or the punitive peace that would sow the seeds of an even greater conflict. The book fascinates not despite these errors, but because of them: watching a brilliant mind grapple with an unknowable future reveals as much about the limits of prediction as it does about the prescient power of imagination.