Anticipations

Anticipations is H. G. Wells's nonfiction attempt to forecast the social, political, technological, and military shape of the twentieth century. Wells considers transport, cities, war, class, government, and the changing organization of modern life, writing with the confidence and anxiety of an age watching machines transform society. The book is speculative argument rather than fiction.

Its interest now lies in both its insight and its limitations. Anticipations shows Wells thinking like a futurist, connecting technology with social structure and political possibility. Readers interested in futurism, early twentieth-century thought, technological change, and the history of social prediction will find a revealing document of modernity imagining its own next stage with urgency, unease, ambition, risk, and reform.