What is Coming? a Forecast of Things After the War
1914
What is Coming? a Forecast of Things After the War
1914
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 What unfolds is a remarkable historical document.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.
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“The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for future guessing. "Think of the men who have walked here!" said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: "Think of the men who will.””
— H. G. Wells
“There are countless men in the world living very comfortably indeed, and running businesses that were once their own property for their creditors. There are still more who have written off princely debts and do not seem to be a "ha'p'orth the worse." And their creditors have found a balm in time and philosophy. Bankruptcy is only painful and destructive to small people and helpless people; but then for them everything is painful and destructive; it can be a very light matter to big people; it may be almost painless to a State.””
— H. G. Wells
“war is going to end not in the complete smashing up and subjugation of either side, but in a general exhaustion that will make the recrudescence of the war still possible but very terrifying.””
— H. G. Wells
“To the prophetic mind all history is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.””
— H. G. Wells
“Think of the men who have walked here!" said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: "Think of the men who will.””
— H. G. Wells
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Wells, H. G.. What is Coming? a Forecast of Things After the War. Lex, lex-books.com/book/what-is-coming-a-forecast-of-things-after-the-war-57bfc25a-d205-4c38-968a-9d690fb1623a.Wells, H. G. (1914). What is Coming? a Forecast of Things After the War. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/what-is-coming-a-forecast-of-things-after-the-war-57bfc25a-d205-4c38-968a-9d690fb1623aWells, H. G.. What is Coming? a Forecast of Things After the War. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/what-is-coming-a-forecast-of-things-after-the-war-57bfc25a-d205-4c38-968a-9d690fb1623a.
