As you know, I like looking at past predictions of the future. I’ve already reviewed HG Wells 1899 “When the sleeper wakes”. His “The shape of things to come” is very very different.
Although billed as science fiction, the first hundred pages is almost pure modern history. And if you only ever read one history of the Great War then this is the one you should read.
I am, by nature, a cynic and a critic. But I couldn’t find a single wrong word in Wells’s historical analysis up to 1933. Nothing unnecessary is said, and nothing essential is left out. This book makes me realise how HG Wells is one of the great wordsmiths of all time. His writing is flattering and critical in equal measure. Or to put it another way, it involves deep analysis and reassembly in equal measure, like a surgeon doing an anatomy lesson and stitching the patient up afterwards.
The purpose of Wells’s deep historical analysis of the past is to only lightly touch on individuals and battles and political parties. And to look deeper into social and economic factors, technological advance and national psyche. Because individual eccentricities, individual battles, tell us very little about how the past affects the future. Whereas social and economic factors from the past, technological advance and national psyche tell us much more accurately how history repeats, and how each repeat differs from the original. Wells is completely up to date on his reading of commentaries on modern history, to the extent that he frequently quotes from works by others right up to the date of publication.
The fiction in this book is presented as a historical text from 2106 CE. He interestingly use CE ‘christian era’ instead of AD ‘anno domini’. Scientific documents these days use CE. The era between 1933 and 2020 is named “the age of frustration”. I find this charmingly apt.
In terms of what Wells sees for 2106 CE, think of the John Lennon song “Imagine”.
“The shape of things to come” is only loosely ordered chronologically. Instead it follows the … perhaps easiest if I give the initial chaper headings.
The first five chapters deal with the necessity for, and actuality of, increasing globalisation and global awareness in the twenty years before 1933.
Chapter 4 deals with Karl Marx and his disciples. Marx’s chief merit was the recognition of how physical necessity affects social and political systems. His chief fault was “his insane hatred of the bourgeoisie”. Marx “never gave his disciples the ghost of an idea for a competent administration”.
Ch 6 has the following insightful passage.
“The inevitable end of free competition is the consolidation of competitors.The inevitable end of the need for profit is a steady reduction in costs through increasing efficiency – a steady decrease of the ratio of employment to output. Both lead inevitably to an increase in the proportion of unemployable people”.
Wells goes on to say:
“The primary task of world administration is to arrest this squeezing out of human beings from active economic life”.
mollwollfumble deserves censure for not seeing this. Heinlein saw it in his early work “For us the living” (1938), but had forgotten it by the time he wrote “The moon is a harsh mistress” (1966) and “Time enough for love” (1973).
“The ever increasing productivity found its vent in warfare. Without this cancer growth of armies and navies the problem of over-production latent in competitive private enterprise would have revealed itself in an overwhelming mass of unemployment”.
Ch 7 starts Wells’s analysis of the Great War 1914-1918.
As a writer, Wells does not pull his punches, and they land accurately.
The responsibility for the war cannot by ascribed to any one nation, Germany, France or Britain. “The war was, in immediate fact, an aimless and fruitless slaughter, the wounding and mutilation of perhaps twenty million human beings, and a vast burning up of material wealth”.
“The details of the struggle itself were as horrible and distressing as they were inconsequent, and there is no use in mastering their sequence in detail … The names of such generals as Haig, Kitchener, French, Joffre, Foch and Ludendorff, and such battles as Tannenberg, the Marne, the Somme, Passhendaele, the Faukland Isles and Jutland need mean nothing to the ordinary citizen today.”
Wells dismisses Churchill the man quickly as follows:
“Churchill was one of the most alert personalities in the conflict. He displays a vigorous naive puerility that still gives his story an atoning charm. He has the insensitiveness of a child of thirteen who knocks over a row of toy soldiers.”
The other leaders are also dismissed quickly:
“Ludendorff, Bulow, Clemenceau, Fisher, Foch, there is a real horror in their wrinkled meanness and envies, their gross enthusiasms and their sincere bloodthirstiness and hate.”
Having dismissed the leaders, Wells then discusses the “grimmer actualities of the struggle”. Perhaps a few lines will indicate the tone. “The French upon their eastern front went forward to the attach with immense élan, in bright uniforms and to the historical inspiration of the ‘Marseillaise’. They were massacred.”
Wells turns to the technology of war, particularly the submarines. For example “When they leaked the salt water was apt to affect the accumulators and chlorine gas was released to torment and suffocate the crews”.
Of the soldiers, “In obedience to the dictates of the blindest prejudices and the most fatuous loyalties they did their utmost to kill men against whom they had no conceivable grievance … the Russians ran out of ammunition; they lost well over a million before the end of 1914, and yet they continued to obey orders”.
The first sign of what Wells later calls “an outbreak of sanity” occurred with French troops. “General Nivelle, French Commander-in-Chief, ordered the advance of masses of infantry into intense fields of fire (resulting in) the loss of nearly a couple of hundred thousand men. A French division ordered into action to continue this futile holocaust refused to march. … The next sign of sanity in this world torture was the collapse of the grotesque Russian aristocracy”.
Then the United States entered this war.
Ch 8 is about the Peace Ship funded by Henry Ford.
Many people were sympathetic but unhelpful, including President Wilson. “The American Press set itself to magnify, distort and invent every weakness. A campaign of ridicule began, so skilful and persistent that it stripped away one supporter after another from the constellation, and smothered the essential sanity of the project”. Despite this, “His delegation was received with great enthusiasm in Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Holland, those European states that managed to stay out of the conflict to the end”.
Wells speculates that the smear campaign was orchestrated by “the swiftly growing munitions industry of America”. President Wilson switched from pacifist to warmonger, bringing the US into the war in 1917.
Ch 9 is more about how the American armaments industry used its control of newspapers to extend the Great War for another year.
Wells quotes an essay, that may or may not exist, about penguins and penguin hunters. “Waddling about or flapping their stumpy wings while the massacre goes on. They seem to be vaguely interested in the killing of their fellows, but in no way stirred to flight or resistance.” Humanity treated the Great War in much the same way.
“The senescent Christian Churches had indeed a very direct interest in war. Under the stresses of loss and death people turned again to the altar. The despised curate of the croquet lawn became the heroic padre of the sentimental war stories”.
Ch 10 is “Versailles: Seedbed of disasters”
President Wilson proposed substituting a world pax “for a brief interval”. The other attendees were “hard-shell representatives of national advantage”. Yet Wilson “had the common politician’s way of regarding great propositions as a means to small ends”. “Because of Wilson’s obstinate resolve to monopolise the immortal glory of World Salvation for himself, the US Senate rejected the Covenant of the League of Nations altogether”. The authority of the League rapidly dwindled to nothing.
The destruction of Germany was the sole idea of the French, and everyone else was only too ready to agree, for their own selfish reasons. (Wells does not reiterate what he pointed out earlier, that on at least two occasions the greatest destroyers of the French were their own generals). Wells is shocked that “The imposition of vast monetary payments on Germany was the only part of the settlement of Versailles that dealt with financial and economic matters”. “The only outstanding voice warning against this preposterous dislocation of credit and trade was that of British economist J.M. Keynes”.
Wells is highly critical of Poland, which is put back on the map, with its “zestful persecution of ethnic minorities amounting to about a third of the entire population … They were given dominion over the Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Jews (whom particularly they detested), Lithuanians, White Russians and Germans”.
The victors, acutely conscious of how badly Germany had been treated by the treaty, allowed Germany to rearm in contravention of the Treaty. The armament firms and their newspapers naturally encouraged this. And, having been assured that Germany was out of the way, the victors immediately turned on each other. This started with fighting between the Greeks and Turks in 1919. Britain supported the Greeks; France and Italy supported the Turks.
“The most disastrous of all the follies of Versailles was the Polish Corridor” This gave Poland access to the sea by cutting off the German city of Danzig, whose population was 98% German, from Germany. Poland neither needed nor deserved access to the sea.
Ch 11 is about the uselessness of the League of Nations.
Ch 12 is about finance.
Wells brings to light certain people who tended to keep out of the public eye. Wells calls these “Mystery Men” and discusses each in more detail than he discusses either Churchill or Hitler. He discusses Montagu Norman, the incompetent Governor of the Bank of England. He discusses “J.P. Morgan, a queer combination of Yankee gentleman and German junker. Always honest and never candid”. He discusses “Sir Basil Zaharov, armaments salesman”, and Ivar Kreuger, who became enormorusly wealthy from his monopoly on match production. He mentions “the Balkan gang” who manipulated Eastern European currencies, and the British Chancellor of the Exchequer for whom a mysterious rite known as “balancing the Budget” had to be performed.
Wells concludes that the important people out of the public eye that run things are “bereft of illumination”.
Ch 13 is about unemployment and the depression.
The transition between the past and the future is handled so seamlessly that we wouldn’t know where is was without Wells signalling it to us as a transition from Book 1 to Book 2. Here we have a perfect test of Asimov’s “psychohistory” from his “Foundation” series. Using a nearly complete knowledge of the past, and how it is based on social and psychological forces, how well can the future be predicted?
The largest of the mistakes by HG Wells in predicting the future could, just barely, have been foreseen by 1933. Wells deserves no censure at all for missing them.
The least important of these mistakes is the use of chemical weapons in the next major war. Wells predicted that the progress of the next war would have been dominated by aerial attack by chemical weapons. Had chemical weapons been used, it would have been. Chemical weapons were not used by any side significantly in aerial attacks in the next war, because of fear of reprisal.
A second important mistake concerns Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. This was announced in 1932 and implemented in 1933 to 1939. Wells was aware of the New Deal, but thought it wouldn’t work. It did work, and the result not only ended the Great Depression, it turned the United States into the first superpower. A version of the same strategy by the Nazis in Germany led to a much faster recovery than expected. Wells expected the Great Depression to continue indefinitely.
A third important mistake involves medicine. Penicillin was first successfully used in 1930, but wasn’t purified until 1940 or much used before 1942. Wells expected a pandemic to immediately follow the next war (as Spanish Flu followed the Great War). And predicted a death toll from an untreatable pox-like disease five years later to be of order half the world population, a billion people.
There is no mention by Wells of either nuclear weapons or the computer revolution. Again, both could just barely have been foreseen in 1933. The nuclear chain reaction was first proposed by Leo Szilard in 1933, but it would be another five years even before nuclear fission was discovered. The transistor is a direct descendent of the crystal used in crystal radio after 1902, and Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor in 1926, but it wasn’t until 1947 that the first working transistor was made.
Wells prediction of what would happen in World War II, which he calls the “Last War” is startlingly good. He predicted both the eastern and western sides of the war. In the east, Japan ends up fighting China on the mainland and the United States at sea, and loses. In the west, the central European countries Germany, Italy and Austria fight Poland, Yugoslavia and Russia in the east and France and Britain in the west. Germany, Italy and Austria are united under Hitler and Mussolini. They lost. He foresaw Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.
This is an amazingly accurate prediction. So far as I can tell, this book, The Shape of Things to Come, is the only SciFi book in existence predict the progress and outcome of a future war that actually happened. Most SciFi authors either avoid wars completely, or set them so far in the future as to make the progress uncheckable. To predict a war that is going to happen six years in the future takes an enormous amount of courage, as well as startlingly good scholarship and a thorough knowledge of sociology and politics.
So, how does Wells manage to predict the entry of the United States into the war with Japan without foreknowledge of Pearl Harbour? In Wells’s scenario, the entry of the United States into the Pacific War occurs in a much more natural way, as a reaction to losing two submarines.
Because Wells doesn’t see the quick end to the depression, the slower recovery of Germany results in Poland attacking Germany rather than the other way around. There are other differences, but they are minor, such as the war in the Pacific being largely over by 1940, and the war in Europe lasting to 1949. In Wells narrative, as well as in real life, the Polish Corridor cutting Danzig off from Germany starts the war in Europe.
The differences in conduct between the Last War and the Great War are also well predicted by Wells. He correctly shows that there can be no Trafalgar-like final battle in an air war. And predicts massive civilian losses on both sides in air raids that resemble the attacks on Coventry and Dresden. Wells considers what we now call blitzkrieg, but dismisses it as an untenable British strategy. Because Germany first appears in the war as the attacked rather than as the attacker blitzkreig was out the question for Germany as well. He correctly predicts the absense of trench warfare.
I find Wells’s prediction that WW-II will be the final world war to be startling as well as accurate. A third world war was still looking likely as recently as 1988. Wells did predict the continuance of guerilla warfare, which in real life made a big appearance in Vietnam, and small wars.
The whole “The Shape of Things to Come” tends towards a world state like that of Lenon’s “Imagine”, which starts to appear after Wells’s great pandemic of 1959 and is essentially complete in 2020. The closest we have to that in real life is the European Union, which began in 1993, following on from the Brussels Merger Treaty of 1967.
Overall, my low opinion of Asimov’s “psychohistory” from his “Foundation” series continues. The further into the future one looks, the less accurate one’s predictions can be. The timescale is inherently unpredictable, the timing error of ±25% in “The Shape of Things to Come” is as good as one can get. Gross statistics are inherently unpredictable, Wells predicts a world population of 1 billion in 1960 (down from 2 billion in 1927) whereas the real world population was 3 billion. Technology breakthroughs and their influence on sociology and national psychology is equally unpredictable. Trends are predictable, sort of, but catastophes (eg. pandemics) aren’t. Even individual politicians make a difference, not so much because of what they do but more commonly because they use great propositions as a means of achieving small ends.
HG Wells wrote his previous history book “A Short History of the World” in 1922. My main memory of this is that he has lifted his thinking well above the Anglocentric attitude of other English-speaking historians of the time. He puts as much effort into the history of other European nations as he does into British history, but the result is still Eurocentric. In “The Shape of Things to Come” in 1933, Wells extends his thinking further to include the United States, Russia, China and Japan, but his thinking is still short of being truly global.
A final comment from mollwollfumble. To someone of 1933 aware of the British occupation of India, the concept of “population = power”, which in the present day forms the basis for the superpowers, must have seemed a very foreign idea indeed. And 1933 was in the middle of a period of great global tension. Although today we may get away with the null prediction that “tomorrow is the same as today”, the null prediction wouldn’t work back in 1933, and Wells is very very aware of that.
I failed to mention above that Wells is highly critical of “parliamentary democracy” and less critical of the Russian “soviet” democracy.