Books: Wellsian Future

THINGS TO COME—H. G. Wells—Mac-millan ($1.50).

In the past few years a large number English novels, dealing with life in the near or remote future, have testified to the despair that imaginative men experience when they try to visualize the forthcoming developments of society. Pictures of the future range from its complete lapse into barbarism presented by John Collier in Full Circle to the monotonously sanitary and inhuman order satirized by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Last week Herbert George Wells offered yet another conceivable fate for mankind with Things to Come, a scenario which London Films’s Alexander Korda is now transmuting into a cinema. In his previous guesses (The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine), Mr. Wells has pictured the world depopulated by interplanetary warfare, dominated by a monstrous chicken, consumed by bugs, perishing in foul air. In Things to Come mankind endures 30 years of war, a plague called the Wandering Sickness, a return to quasi-feudal society. After 1970, things pick up somewhat. A group of airmen band together, enforce peace and exercise a benevolent despotism. But by 2055, another revolution against peace, order and progress has broken out.

Although it contains a suburban little romance, oddly out of key with its world-shaking social events, Things to Come is most interesting in its depiction of ruin Novelist Wells’s imagination flourishes when he visualizes gas bombs falling, children being killed, Brooklyn Bridge destroyed, the Eiffel Tower collapsing, rats and wild dogs roaming the streets. But when he comes to imagine the productive days of the reconstruction he can only dream vaguely of semi-subterranean cities flooded with artificial light, peopled by graceful creatures in shapely garments growing agitated over the thought of a flight around the Moon. Inhabitants of the future ski down waterfalls, which is presumably as dangerous in another century as it was up to this week. When the daughter of John Cabal, dictator, volunteers to fly through space with her sweetheart in the interests of science and adventure, all dissatisfied elements in the world rally in a great antiscientific revolt, are confounded when Catherine and her lover running ahead of the mob, go whistling off toward the stars.

Typical of the cinema method employed in Things to Come is the passage describing what happens when they leave the Earth: “Clouds of dust obscure the screen and clear to show the crowd after the shock. Some press their ears as if they were painful, others stare under their hands up into the sky. Then the crowd begins to stream back towards the city . . . in a straggling, aimless manner, and pausing ever and again to stare at the sky.”