Talk:The Shape of Things to Come

World Encyclopædia Establishment
um, that section reads: "The latter organisations have no apparent contemporary parallels." really?

"The book described something called the 'World Encyclopædia Establishment'." What about Wikipedia?

"'Central Observation Bureau' and the 'Record and Library Network', were 'complex organization of discussion, calculation, criticism and forecast' created by the Air Dictatorship." um, the Internet, CNN, Blogosphere, CIA, NSA, State Intelligence? I get they were not all set up by the "Air Dictatorship" but there are some obvious "contemporary parallels." i propose some editing.--65.113.35.130 (talk) 22:09, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Marx
Wells despised Marx and generally refused to concede the idea of a dictatorship withering away came from him. Not sure how to put that in.--T. Anthony 06:24, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Wells loved Marx... buy wasn't a fan of Leninism and alike.

-G


 * Umm you got it backwards. On page 143 of his Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a very ordinary Brain I quote "There would have been creative evolution, and possibly creative revolution of a far finer type in Karl Marx had never lived" and on page 625 "My habitual polemical disposition to disparage Marx does not blind me to his pioneer awareness of..." So at best "I disparage him, but he was sometimes right." Whereas of Lenin he states, "I grudge subscribing to the 'great man' conception of human affairs, but if we are going to talk at all of greatness among our species, then I must admit that Lenin at least was a very great man."(pg 666 ) He wrote that Autobiography in 1934, about the time this came out so presumably his views were similar then.--T. Anthony 10:54, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Use of CE
The page on Common Era claims that its first usage as a dating system was used "as early as 1715", which predates this work by more than a century. Specifically, "[s]ome Jewish academics were already using the CE and BCE abbreviations by the mid-19th century", with a source cited. This article contains no source for the claim that Wells was one of the first, and flatly contradicts the CE article. I'm by no means an expert on the subject, but it seemed worthy of bringing up. 72.236.6.82 (talk) 04:19, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Polish Corridor
I removed this section because it seems to be based on the incorrect assumption that this prediction proved accurate. Well, it didn't. The war did not start because of the Polish corridor. And there are just too many incorrect predictions by Wells to list them.

===Polish Corridor as cause for World War II=== H. G. Wells criticized the Polish Corridor as one of the future causes of World War II: And to keep the waters of the Vistula as pure and sweet for Poland as the existence of Danzig at the estuary allowed, the peace-makers ran the Vistula boundary between Poland and east Prussia, not in the usual fashion midway along the stream, but at a little distance on the east Prussian side (Jacques Kayser, La Paix en Péril, 1931). So that the east German population, the peasant cultivator, the erstwhile fisherman, the shepherd with his flocks to water, was pulled up by a line of frontier posts and a Polish rifle within sight of the stream. Within a dozen years of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles the Polish Corridor was plainly the most dangerous factor in the European situation. It mocked every projection of disarmament. It pointed the hypnotized and impotent statescraft of Europe straight towards a resumption of war.

Str1977 (talk) 15:39, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Chopped section
Despite being pretty reasonable, I chopped the following text because it doesn't contain any cites. Please find a reliable 3rd party commentary that makes this connection before re-including. Ashmoo (talk) 15:52, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

The Kipling connection Wells's "Air and Sea Control", the association of pilots and technicians which controls the world's communications and eventually develops into a world government, seems a clear literary descendant of an institution called the Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) in the short stories "With the Night Mail" and "Easy as A.B.C.", by Rudyard Kipling, with which Wells was certainly familiar. The Kipling stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world where airships are commonly used both for freight and passenger service, as well as for preventing civil unrest through use of powerful sonic weapons:

The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements, and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little Planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.

The above description, from Kipling's "With the Night Mail", seems very applicable to the worldwide institution depicted by Wells. However, Kipling's stories contain dystopian elements.

Wells's book might have also been influenced by George Griffith's 1893 The Angel of the Revolution in which a band of revolutionaries known as 'The Brotherhood of Freedom' masters the technology of flight and eventually establishes a pax aeronautica over the earth.

Film adaptations
The Film adaptations section now reads: "Information erased due to page sabotage. Section in need of re-writing." Previously: 'There have been two film adaptations of the novel. "Things to Come", a 1936 film with a screenplay by Wells himself. "H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come", a 1979 science-fiction film not at all based on the book.' The article on the latter film supports the summary here. I have not seen the film, so have not edited, but it would seem to be nonsense to name it as an adaptation of the novel. --Mabzilla (talk) 20:13, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Huxley misrepresented
Caste in Brave New World is not just psychological. Two other factors determine caste. One is whether an embryo is Bokanovskified -- massively twinned, the highest twinning producing the lowest caste. The other is whether an embryo is doped with chemicals like alcohol to stunt growth -- Bernard Marx was suspected of having been doped in embryo with alcohol producing his smaller frame. The fact that this section cites to no sources supports the note about original research -- badly done as it happens. 100.15.127.199 (talk) 03:38, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

There's also this abomination - " It was that vision that Wells believed would cause Huxley to be remembered by posterity as a "reactionary writer". " There's two mentions of "reactionary" in the paragraph, and no citation for it. Its just silly political axe grinding. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.7.28.113 (talk) 17:21, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Islam, et. al.
Redacting "dissolution" in the current lede per the following quote from the online text. The word "islam" occurs 7 times and this is the last: We have told already how that issue was joined, and shown how necessary it was to bring all the moral and intellectual training of the race into direct and simple relations with the Modern State organization. After 2020 there is no record of any schools being open in the world except the Modern State schools. Christianity where it remained sacerdotal and intractable was suppressed, but over large parts of the world it was not so much abolished as watered down to modernity. Everywhere its endowments had vanished in the universal slump; it could find no supply of educated men to sustain its ministry; the majority of its churches stood neglected and empty, and when the great rebuilding of the world began most of them vanished with all the other old edifices that lacked beauty or interest. They were cleared away like dead leaves.

The story of Islam was closely parallel. It went more readily even than Christianity because its school organization was weaker. It was pinned very closely to the teaching of Arabic. The decadence of that language shattered its solidarity much as the disuse of Latin disintegrated Western Christianity. It left a few-score beautiful mosques as Christianity left a few-score beautiful chapels, churches and cathedrals. And patterns, legends, memories remained over in abundance, more gracious and lovely by far than the realities from which they were distilled. Lycurgus (talk) 22:10, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Unfortunately, as I read this, "disestablish" is plainly incorrect. While not literally wrong (disestablishment clearly did occur), it does not go far enough. Dissolution clearly matches the plain reading of the text - which makes an analogy to Christianity (which is explicitly described with the word "disintegrated") and which is characterized as having so few adherents it cannot even find enough believers to keep the ranks of the clergy full, which was the end of it. Both Christianity and Islam are, in the world of the novel, not religions any more the same way the old Greek/Roman pagan religion hasn't been a religion with adherents in a very long time. Therefore 'dissolved' is the appropriate term to use. LrdDimwit (talk) 20:41, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Acknowledged/Agreed. Lycurgus (talk) 22:50, 18 May 2020 (UTC)