H.G. Wells: The prophet of the future we are now living

From science fiction to futurism

By the 1930s, Wells’s warnings became more urgent and more direct. The Great Depression had shattered the global economy. Fascism was rising in Germany and Italy. The League of Nations was faltering. Convinced that the modern world was drifting toward collapse, Wells abandoned metaphor and turned to speculative geopolitics. The Shape of Things to Come is less a novel than a “future history,” a sweeping narrative of the 20th and 21st centuries, imagined as though written retrospectively from the year 2106. It remains one of the most ambitious works of futurism ever published.

Collapse and the rise of the technocrats

In Wells’s imagined future, the world descends into a catastrophic war beginning in 1940. The conflict drags on for decades, reducing cities to ruins and nations to exhaustion. In the wake of this prolonged war comes a mysterious plague, the “wandering sickness,” which spreads uncontrollably and wipes out large swaths of the population. Governments collapse. Economies disintegrate. Civilization itself teeters on the edge of extinction.

From the ruins emerges an unexpected force: not a military superpower, but a coalition of scientists, engineers, and aviators, the “Airmen.” These technocrats, bound by a belief in reason and scientific planning, seize control of the remaining infrastructure and slowly establish a “Modern World State.” They abolish national borders, disband standing armies, suppress religious and ideological extremism, and impose a new global order based on knowledge, coordination, and technological advancement. It is not democratic, but in Wells’s view, it is the only path to survival.

In this new society, Wells rejects Marx’s vision of violent revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, the working class is “pulled upward” through generations of social mobility and education. Physical labor still exists, but it is carried out not by a permanent underclass, but by young people performing two years of “labor conscription,” a civic duty replacing obsolete military service. The goal is to create a classless society composed entirely of educated, middle-class intellectuals.

After about a hundred years, the Air Dictatorship is overthrown in a bloodless coup. Its rulers are retired with honor, and the world state begins to “wither away,” leaving behind a truly utopian order. In this final stage, humanity is envisioned as a society of polymaths, every citizen the intellectual equal of history’s greatest geniuses.

The moon as a moral destination

One of the most remarkable aspects of Wells’s vision is his insistence that humanity’s rebirth would not be complete until it left the Earth. In the climactic scene of the 1936 film adaptation Things to Come, which Wells himself scripted, the World State launches its first manned space mission to the Moon in the year 2036. The rocket rises into the heavens as one character declares:“All the universe — or nothing. Which shall it be?”

This was written more than three decades before the actual Moon landing. At a time when air travel itself was still a novelty, Wells had already imagined space exploration not merely as a scientific milestone, but as a moral imperative. To him, reaching the Moon was proof that humanity had transcended its tribal divisions and embraced its higher purpose. The cosmos, in Wells’s mind, represented the final step in the evolution of civilization, a unifying frontier.

The suppression of religion and culture

Wells’s World State is not only technological and economic, it is also cultural and ideological, demanding the complete re-engineering of human belief systems. One of the most radical and controversial aspects of his vision is the abolition of all organized religion, which he sees as incompatible with the Modern State’s monopoly on education and social development.

Islam is among the first faiths to be dismantled. The Air Police descend upon Mecca and shut down the holy sites without significant resistance. The decline of Arabic as a language, replaced by a globally expanded English, accelerates the disappearance of Islamic identity. Only a handful of mosques are preserved as architectural curiosities.

Christianity, especially Catholicism, is treated more dramatically. In Wells’s history, a revived Fascist Italy provokes resistance from the Catholic Church. When the Pope blesses new aircraft, he and the bishops are gassed into unconsciousness. The Church retreats to Ireland, the last bastion of resistance, and later to Latin America under a “coloured Pope in Pernambuco,” but in every case, it is eventually subdued and dissolved.

Judaism too is slowly extinguished, not through Holocaust-level extermination (as Wells did not anticipate that tragedy), but through pogroms and social pressure. Kosher practices are banned. Zionism fails to gain traction in a world that deems nation-states obsolete. In time, Jewish communities are forcibly assimilated into the emerging global culture and lose their distinct identity.

Buddhism, by contrast, is mentioned only briefly. Wells assumes its quiet disappearance from East Asia without serious resistance, a simplification that today would seem both naïve and orientalist.

These projections reflect Wells’s deep secularism and his belief that religious authority must be dismantled in order to achieve rational global governance. But they also reveal a blind spot, a Eurocentric, technocratic confidence that underestimates the enduring emotional and cultural power of faith. As Lebanese-American scholar George Nasser observed, the idea that a self-appointed global elite could calmly eradicate Islam from its holiest sites and impose its ideology from a base in Basra was not only arrogant, but revealing. In Wells’s imagined 1979, a secular world order triumphs. In real history, 1979 gave birth to Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran.

Parallels with the world we inhabit

Nearly a century later, much of what Wells imagined feels eerily familiar. World War II did begin in 1939, and while it did not last a century, its aftershocks continue to shape global politics. The 21st century, far from being an era of peace, has been marked by a continuum of war, from 9/11 to Ukraine to the Middle East, and by a growing sense that World War III is no longer unthinkable. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic echoed Wells’s “wandering sickness” with disturbing precision, an invisible pathogen sweeping the globe, overwhelming institutions, and redrawing the balance of power.

Wells’s economic predictions also resonate. He described a future of collapsing currencies, interrupted trade, and resource scarcity, a vision that aligns uncomfortably well with the global financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic-era supply chain failures, and the inflationary shocks of the 2020s. Wells understood that economic instability is not peripheral to social collapse, it is central to it.

Perhaps most striking, however, is Wells’s anticipation of the rise of technocratic governance. While we do not yet live under a formal World State, many aspects of global power today resemble his imagined order. Multinational tech firms control communication and public discourse. Pharmaceutical giants shape public health decisions. Supranational institutions and unelected experts make decisions with global implications. Power has drifted from parliaments to platforms, from presidents to programmers.

Yet the system we have inherited is not quite what Wells imagined. His technocracy was meritocratic and public-spirited, a kind of rational utopia. Ours is messy, opaque, and driven as much by profit as by planning. Still, the outlines are recognizable: the weakening of the nation-state, the centralization of knowledge-based power, and the quiet drift toward post-democratic systems of control.

2036 and the decade that has now begun

And hovering above all this is space. Not as fantasy, but as reality. Private companies, not governments, are now preparing to return to the Moon. Billionaire industrialists are launching rockets and speaking of Mars colonies. The symbolism is potent. Wells imagined space as the moment humanity proves it can rise above itself. Today, space has returned to the center of political imagination, but with more ambiguity and less idealism.

In Things to Come, the 1936 film adaptation of The Shape of Things to Come, Wells scripted a world in which the Second World War begins in 1940 and drags on for nearly a century, ending only in 2036 with the launch of a rocket to the Moon. Though stylized, this vision was not simply about war in the conventional sense. It depicted an extended period of unrelenting global crisis, war, economic collapse, pandemics, and the disintegration of the old order.

We are now in 2025, just over a decade away from Wells’s imagined turning point. And disturbingly, the world today feels as though it is accelerating toward the very scenario he foresaw.

The geopolitical architecture is trembling. War has returned to Europe. The Middle East is once again engulfed in open conflict. Taiwan and the South China Sea have become flashpoints. The boundaries between peacetime and wartime, between civilian and military, are dissolving. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and cyberwarfare are reshaping the very nature of global power.

This is not a world at peace. Nor is it a world at war in the traditional sense. It is a transitional world, drifting or perhaps hurtling toward something Wells understood all too well: a reckoning. Whether this reckoning ends in ruin or renewal remains unresolved.

H.G. Wells was not a time traveler (?), but he understood how to read the trajectory of history. He saw that humanity was approaching a series of converging crises: war, disease, economic fragility, and moral exhaustion. He believed these would either destroy us or force us to grow up. In his fiction, the world almost ends before it finally unites. And only then does it look to the stars. Now, in the very decade he marked as decisive, the final stretch of a 100-year unraveling, the question is no longer theoretical.Will we stumble forward as we are, or rise, as Wells hoped, to something higher?