Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, generally known as Anticipations, was written by H.G. Wells at the age of 34. He later called the book, which became a bestseller, "the keystone to the main arch of my work." Taking the revolution in transport facilitated by the "mechanical revolution" as his point of departure, Wells told readers they were living through a reorganization of human society that would alter every dimension of life. An academic biographer has described the degree of accuracy of Wells's predictions as "certainly...

Mankind in the Making (1903) is H.G. Wells's sequel to Anticipations (1901). Mankind in the Making analyzes the "process" of "man's making," i.e. "the great complex of circumstances which mould the vague possibilities of the average child into the reality of the citizen of the modern state." Taking an aggressive tone in criticizing many aspects of contemporary institutions, Wells proposed a doctrine he called "New Republicanism," which "tests all things by their effect upon the evolution of man." The volume consists of eleven "papers" that were first published in the British Fortnightly...

PROPHECY may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences. For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind. Science is very largely analysis aimed at forecasting. The test of any scienti c law is our veri cation of its anticipations. The scienti c training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really here now--if only one could see it. And when one is...

"The Country of the Blind" is a short story written by H. G. Wells. It was rst published in the April 1904 issue of The Strand Magazine and included in a 1911 collection of Wells's short stories, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. It is one of Wells's best known short stories, and features prominently in literature dealing with blindness. While attempting to summit the unconquered crest of Parascotopetl (a ctitious mountain in Ecuador), a mountaineer named Nunez (prn: noon-yes) slips and falls down the far side of the mountain. At the end of his descent, down a snow-slope in the...

New Worlds for Old (1908), which appeared in some later editions with the subtitle "A Plain Account of Modern Socialism," was one of several books and pamphlets that H.G. Wells wrote about the socialist future in the period 1901-1908, while he was engaged in an effort to reform the Fabian Society. As a result of Wells's earlier books and articles, he was "bombarded with requests for pieces on socialism." Many of the chapters of New Worlds for Old are reworked versions of these pieces. He told an American publisher that his intended audience was intelligent young people, especially those...

The Soul of a Bishop tells the story of a spiritual crisis that leads Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester, to give up his diocese in England's industrial heartland and leave the Anglican Church. Troubled during World War I by doctrinal doubts and a sense of the irrelevance of his Anglicism as well as nervousness and insomnia, a crisis is precipitated by a visit to a wealthy parishioner's home where he meets an extremely wealthy American widow, Lady Sunderbund. To her he speaks for the first time of his religious discontent. Shortly thereafter he takes a drug that, instead of mitigating...

War and the Future (1917) is a work of war propaganda by H.G. Wells that was published in the North America under the title Italy, France, and Britain at War (the subtitle of the British original). Wells would have preferred the title The War of Ideas, but his publisher over-ruled him. Except for the opening piece, its chapters were published as articles in the press. Though proclaiming early in the volume that "I avow myself an extreme Paci st," Wells staunchly supported Britain's war against Germany "in the hope that so we and the world may be freed from the German will-to-power and all its...

In the Fourth Year - Anticipation's Of A World Peace - is a collection H.G. Wells assembled in the spring of 1918 from essays he had recently published discussing the problem of establishing lasting peace when World War I ended. It is mostly devoted to plans for the League of Nations and the discussion of post-war politics. Wells states in his May 1918 preface that the notion of a War to End War had seemed Utopian when he advanced it in 1914, but that in 1918 it had achieved "an air not only of being so practical, but of being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing before...

First and Last Things is a 1908 work of philosophy by H. G. Wells setting forth his beliefs in four "books" entitled "Metaphysics," "Of Belief," "Of General Conduct," and "Some Personal Things." Parts of the book were published in the Independent Magazine in July and August 1908. Its main intellectual in uences are Darwinism and certain German thinkers Wells had read, such as August Weismann. The pragmatism of William James, who had become a friend of Wells, was also an in uence. The origins of the First and Last Things are to be found in a reading and discussion group of which Amber Reeves...

The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents is a collection of fteen fantasy and science ction short stories written by the English author H. G. Wells between 1893 and 1895. All of the stories had rst been published in various weekly and monthly periodicals. This story is a chilling satire about the potential role of scientists in facilitating bioterrorism. It concerns a Bacteriologist is so pleased with his own work that he gives the Anarchist access to it, and in expounding on the power of the cholera bacillus (which he feels he has in his own power), he gives the Anarchist the information he...