Wells as historian of the future, with a surprisingly good batting average at least half a century ahead. The book concerns more than mere forthcoming events, but currents in intellectual, philosophical and political thought. His prior skills in analysing and writing real history are demonstrated well in this novel. ( )

A dystopian/utopian novel, written as a history book from the year 2106 and detailing the rise of a single world government. This is really good, despite what i will say about it's shortcomings, be assured that those are minor. As mentioned it is a history book and as such it can be quite dry with all of socio-economic talk etc. but its also really fascinating.
Once i saw where it was going i thought it was going to turn out very silly and unrealistic. However when it got to the details it was remarkably detailed and authentic. Wells must have studied a lot of history books to be able to mimic them in this manner. The name dropping, references, argument and counter-arguments, every facet of this makes it seem real.
BUT i do have a few gripes, one, its really long, a bit longer than it needed to be in my opinion although i do think the slowness of things added to the feeling of authenticity.
Secondly i never understood how the organization's mentioned actually worked, in the details. How were people elected or promoted etc. it seemed a little hazy in that regard.

Lastly but very much the major problem of this work is its sexism. I'm used to reading old books and good old-fashioned blatant (women should stay in the kitchen) sexism i can easily deal with, this was a little different.
Women are almost entirely absent from this book, something which even the author acknowledges briefly but then excuses in the worst way.
Wells is past the old fashioned sexism, he recognizes women as scientists, business people, artists and aviators so why are they so infrequent in this text you might ask?
Well you see this is a history book, dealing with historically important people and according to Wells, women will NEVER stand out enough to be historically important. He also gives the secondary opinion that women don't WANT to be important.
That they are naturally meek, submissive and unegotistical, instead of the power-hungry, backstabbing, narcissists we all know them to be, just like men.
Its somewhat infuriating just because this book is so close to being perfect, if only Well's could have dragged himself a little further up the evolutionary ladder. ( )

Generally this writer finishes reading a book before reviewing it here. After struggling half way through this book I have decided to abandon this reading. Here is my thinking: First, this is a book of science fiction purporting to give the history of events from 1933 to the year 2106. This may have been interesting reading in prospective of that era, but now that half the course of time has run it is greatly confusing to read what Wells thought might happen while trying to keep tabs on what did happen. Second, the story deals heavily in propaganda, introducing the concept of "fake news." Since here in the first decades of the twenty-first century the major new stations engage largely in fake news, it is less than entertaining to read a book with such arrogant miss-reporting as its basic them. Thirdly, Wells is cheering for the wrong side. He is unabashedly liberal and continues a smear campaign against conservatism. He is too thoroughly modern. WARNING: This book may be injurious to your health! Liberalism is a mental disorder.

One of Wells's last novels, this covers human history from 1933 to 2106. It's not really a novel in the conventional sense, but a history written from the perspective of the future, complete with a frame narrative explaining how it fell into the hands of Wells in 1933 so that he could publish it, which feels a little old-fashioned. (A lot of future narratives in the nineteenth century had this, like Shelley's The Last Man, Loudon's The Mummy!, Shiel's The Purple Cloud, Fawkes's Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe, but once the idea of the future narrative was firmly established around 1900, it largely vanished.)

So it's the not most riveting reading-- this is an entirely different kind of science fiction to that which Wells started his career with novels like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. This is the fiction of ideas, not of sensations. If you're me, though, there's a lot of interesting stuff here. You get Wells's take on how future historians will view his own time (the first few chapters set things up with a discussion of the late Victorian era and the Great War) and then into the second World War, which Wells envisions as lasting from 1940 to 1950, followed by a devastating plague in 1956-57. From here, comes, of course, the World-State, that quixotic organization Wells spent so much of his late life advocating for. I don't love this book, but it's probably the most total depiction of the future-vision of the late Wells that I've read.

Some random points of interest:

• As in his autobiography (I'll get to that next week), Wells disparages those who embrace war as too much like a game. He sees this type embodied in Winston Churchill, of whose writing his future historian says, "He displays a vigorous naive puerility that still gives his story an atoning charm. He has the insensitiveness of a child of thirteen. His soldiers are toy soldiers and he loves to knock over a whole row of them. He enjoyed the war" (65). It's a marked contrast to the way Wells viewed toy soldiers back when he wrote Little Wars. (What comes between the two takes was, of course, an actual war. In The War in the Air, Wells mocks those who fell victim to the nationalist vision of future war, but even he fell victim to it at times.)
• The book suggests that after the beginning of the second World War, architecture had to belatedly adapt to the dangers of gas and aerial bombing. First there came "those usually ill-built concrete cavern systems for refuge" in Paris, Berlin, and London (60). This makes me think of the underground world of the Morlocks in The Time Machine, though Wells had no such idea of underground shelters in 1895 as far as I know. (However, the 1960 film of The Time Machine makes the Morlocks' underground world a nuclear bunker.) Additionally, towns are covered in massive carapace roofs, I guess kind of like giant domes. Basically no skyscrapers are built at all between 1945 and 2000. But in the world of 2106, "[w]e grovel no longer, because we are ceasing to fear each other. The soaring, ever improving homes in which we live today would have sent our great-grandfathers scurrying to their cellars in an ecstasy of terror" (61). Wells always has such great visuals; I wish he hadn't stopped telling stories with them later in his career.
• Wells, as always, saw a massive catastrophe as the only possible prelude to the One World-State, which speaks rather poorly of the efforts he made throughout his life if you think about it! "Out of that medley of human distresses, out of the brains of men stressed out of indolence and complacency by the gathering darkness and suffering about them, there came first the hope, then the broad plan, and at last the achievement of that fruitful order, gathering beauty and happy assurance, in which we live today" (122). Here he's referring to the "Age of Frustration," the period after the Great War where it seemed like everything was about to fall apart because the complexity of social systems had exceeded the capacity of humans to organize them using their existing methods. (This picks up on some ideas Wells introduced in The History of Mr Polly.)
• Wells attributes the problems of the early twentieth century to how once disparate groups were brought into close contact by technological advance: "Two or more population groups, each with its own special narrow and inadaptable culture and usually with a distinctive language or dialect, had been by the change of scale in human affairs jammed together or imposed upon one another. A sort of social dementia ensued" (198). Everyone in the world is so physically close, but they continue to insist on cultural and social separation, with disastrous results. This might be true, but it's difficult to see a way out of it: who are you going to convince to give up their culture? I guess that's why Wells envisions the One World-State beginning with an air dictatorship that just forces everyone to get in line. (He also describes hatred as a disease, and says it can be cured just like coughs can, but that was difficult to imagine in the Age of Frustration.)
• Religion is depicted as inimical to the advancement of human happiness. In 1978, one of the first acts of the One World-State is to gas the Pope; a youthful priest is killed when he's hit in the head by a gas container, "the first killing in a new religious conflict" (346). He becomes Saint Odet of Ostia, the last saint of the Catholic Church, because the One World-State wins this war, also shutting down holy sites in Mecca and India, and closing the kosher slaughterhouses. "There was now to be one faith only in the world, the moral expression of the world community" (347). The argument is that if the new regime doesn't wipe away the systems of the old world, they will wipe it away before it has a chance to take hold.

This is one of the best books I've ever read. One thing that impressed me was the interesting idea to narrate it as a story-within-a-story history book written in the future. However, the most interesting aspect of the book is the fact that many of the events that H. G. Wells described in the novel very closely match the way that events really did play out after it was written.

Thinking about how reading this novel has affected me personally, I can say that I've sligthly lost track of which historical events were real and which ones were made up by Wells, since (as noted above) the novel very closely resembles reality. However, reading it definitely improved my English skills (I'm from Sweden).

As a general assessment, I can say that this is a great book, and it's definitely worth reading. ( )