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there is nothing more strange in this than there is in a differential equation
which allows us to predict where a projectile, launched at a given speed,
will fall; or in the second-sight of an astronomer who foretells an eclipse
of the sun at a certain hour on a certain day. This is not mystical, but
logical only a logic more daring, more long-range than usual.
Let us think ourselves back into the old London into the London
of twenty-five years ago. Not long ago, it would seem, but those twenty-
five years are as a century; it is all so different from nowadays. Cabs
amble peaceably along the streets; imposing, top-hatted coachmen carrying
long whips sit on their high boxes. Horse-drawn omnibuses rumble past,
hooves clopping on the cobbles. In the sky a jackdaw lazily flaps its
wings, not a cloud in sight; the blessed reign of Victoria, everything in
the world has settled firmly in its place and is slowly ossifying; there
will be no more wars, revolutions, catastrophes& And through this
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peaceful, quiet existence perhaps only Wells could see even then the
turbulent, runaway present. While the first motor cars were still barely
crawling along, and their chief function was to amuse the street urchins,
Wells in Anticipations was already giving an exact description of today s
rushing London street, full of taxis, buses and motor lorries a street
where there are as few chances of seeing a horse as there are of seeing
a man in a top hat nowadays in St. Petersburg.
In the sky also Wells could see something very different. Then it was
only the most extreme fantasts who were dreaming of aeroplanes.
Somewhere in America the ancestor of today s aeroplane Hiram Maxim s
machine was still making clumsy trial runs along its rails. But in the
novel When The Sleeper Wakes Wells could already hear the hum of
aeroplanes high in the sky, could already see battles between aircraft
squadrons, and airports everywhere on the ground. That was in 1893.*
And in 1908, when the prospect of a European war was still not a topic
for serious conversation, Wells could already discern monstrous,
unprecedented storm clouds in the seemingly cloudless sky. This was
the year in which he wrote his War in the Air.
[Quotes selections from ch. 8, A World at War .]
And amid all this thunder of a collapsing civilisation familiar details
like these: air battles, aeroplanes, zeppelins, night raids, panic, the blackout,
a sky lacerated by searchlights, the gradual disappearance of books and
newspapers; newspapers replaced by absurd, contradictory rumours; and
finally, people returning to savagery, expending all their energies in a
primeval struggle with hunger and cold in the chilly, dark ruins of houses& .
All this is recounted by a man who seems already to have experienced
our times. Thirty years ago the novel was fantastic now it has become
naturalistic.
The theme of an impending world war and an unprecedented worldwide
upheaval clearly haunted Wells, for he returns to it more than once.
Take his wonderful tale The War of the Worlds (1898). If we read it
now, after a world war and a revolution, how many familiar voices can
be heard from beneath the fairy-tale masks. The battle with the Martians,
for example:
These canisters smashed on striking the ground they did not explode and
incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of a heavy inky vapour, coiling
and pouring upwards in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that
*
Other examples of Zamyatin s inaccurate dating have been silently corrected.
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H.G.WELLS
sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of
that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.
Where is this from? From a fantastic novel written twenty years ago
or from some newspaper of 1915 1916, when the Germans first released
their poison gas?
And another world war in the novel In the Days of the Comet
and a prediction that this war will end with a radical change in human
psychology, with a universal brotherhood of man. And once more a world
war, the ultimate war, in The World Set Free. Here even the combination
of warring powers is precisely marked out: the central European powers
attack the Slav Federation, and France and England engage in its defence.
In The World Set Free all the self-consuming force of the old civilisation
is given in one concise, concentrated symbol atomic energy. It is that
energy which with terrible force binds together the atoms of matter, which
makes atoms into strong steel and which is released in the mysterious
conversion of radium into other elements. Wells imagines that the same
has happened with atomic energy as with aeroplanes: having mastered
atomic energy, man has used it less for constructive than for destructive
ends. During the universal war described in The World Set Free, atomic
bombs have destroyed whole cities, whole countries have destroyed
the old civilisation itself. And on its ruins there begins the construction
of a new one, on new principles.
The work of reconstruction is taken in hand by a World Congress which
creates a single World State. The Congress abolishes parliamentarism in
its old form separate parliaments for each state and, after a short period
of arbitrary organisational rule, announces world elections to one single
world government. The Congress introduces one single monetary unit for
the whole world, works out a lingua franca, a single world-wide language
raises the level of development of the backward agricultural class and reforms
agriculture itself on collective principles. The Congress frees the world from
economic oppression and at the same time assures full freedom of enquiry,
criticism and movement. The Congress itself then gradually reduces its own
power to zero. And a free, anarchic system of government comes into existence,
introducing the epoch known in Wells fantastic universal history as the
epoch of florescence . The overwhelming majority of citizens are artists of
all kinds, the overwhelming majority of the population is occupied with
the highest sphere of human activity art.
Such are the last predictions of Wells. These are the horizons which
he opens in the last of his fantastic novels, the last of his fairy-tales.
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