When we go from economic and philosophical geniuses to literary geniuses, THE PREDICTIVE POWERS SEEM TO GRADUALLY BECOME MORE MUDDLED.
Bellamy credits all the amazing innovations in Looking Backward to America having become, by 2000, a socialist utopia. That, thank God, has not happened. But not for lack of trying by President Obama, et al. The Englishman H. G. WELLS
(1866-1946) was Jules Verne’s successor as the master of science fiction and is perhaps best remembered for his Martian invasion book, The War
Like we don’t have withering of the state already, minus the peaceful part. A supposedly more advanced human race practices telepathy – as if the Internet weren’t enough of a sewer dive into the minds of others. And in A.D. 923, there’s no money. What with credit and debit cards and the Adam Smith “Daedalian wings” of the Federal Reserve, there’s hardly any money now. In 1933, Wells wrote The Shape of Things to Come , a suppositional history of the world from then until 2106. It is a creepy book. The biggest innovation is world government. Think of the slaughter, misery, and oppression caused by little national governments. And a futurist hopes to expand that to planetary size? Fortunately, we’ve got the United Nations, giving us all a good laugh about the very idea of world government. In The Shape of Things to Come , world government gets rid of religion, imposes an oligarchy of intellectuals, dictates the rule of “science,” and does many other things that Wells seems to think are good.
of the Worlds . Wells was a prolific describer of the future. His 1895 novel, The Time Machine , takes the reader all the way to A.D. 802,701, by which time the main innovation has been Darwinian. The working class and the elites have evolved into different species, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Eloi are skinny, vague, naive, entitled, feckless, and childlike. They consider themselves beautiful, do nothing for a living, and eat only fruit. The Eloi are Feel-the-Bern Democrats! The Morlocks are brutish ape-men troglodytes who know how to make and repair everything and do all the work. They eat Eloi alive. The Morlocks are Middle-American Republicans! We didn’t have to wait 800,000 years for that prediction to come true. Later in life, Wells became more specific about future innovations. In his 1923 novel Men Like Gods , 3,000 years of progress has led to peaceful withering of the state.
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