Chatty Casandra

Chatty Cassandra

THE SHAPE or THINGS TO COME-H. G. Wells-Macmillan ($2.50).

Herbert George Wells has always been fascinated by shapes--especially by the shapes of such amorphous figures as Science, History, Tendencies, Cultures. Often in quasi-serious fantastic tales, in mostly serious pamphlets of prophecy, he has tried to describe what particularly tantalizes him: the Future's shape. His listeners are less attentive than they were.

A Cassandra, but an increasingly chatty one, Prophet Wells fills 431 pages with his latest, most garrulous forecast.

Still a perfectionist but not so optimistic as he has been, Author Wells says things will get worse before they get better. In 1935 and 1937 will come world-wide influenza epidemics. By 1942. gas masks, metal hats and epaulets will be weekday wear for civilians. By 1940 kidnapping will be so prevalent that no important person will be without a bodyguard. In 1938-39, the Japanese, having set up another puppet state in China, will be driven out of the interior; the brief Eastern War will ensue, from which both Japan and the U. S. will emerge national wrecks, and revolution will break out in both countries. Positively the last Great War (here Author Wells grows optimistic again) will begin in 1940, will peter out in pestilence, famine, revolution and exhaustion ten years later. Its immediate cause: a Polish Jew with an ill-fitting dental plate. A passenger on a crowded train halted in Danzig station, he modestly turns his face to the window to struggle with the refractory plate. His facial contortions are misinterpreted by a hot-headed Nazi on the platform ... an argu- ment . . . the Nazi shoots the Jew . . . the war-dogs are slipped. . .

In 1955 an epidemic of maculated fever (at present peculiar to captive baboons) will kill half the world's population. Scared at last into their senses, the nations will beat swords into ploughshares, start building up civilization once again. World trade and national governments will have collapsed. In the 1950's life will be hard--no electricity, no automobiles, no tobacco. Harvard University, with T. S. Eliot as president, will be an old-world backwater, out-Oxfording Oxford. Manhattan will be abandoned, "dangerous because of the instability of its huge unoccupied skyscrapers."

After this darkness will come the dawn. World trade will revive, under an Air Dictatorship, but national government will remain a thing of the past. Basic English (invented in 1922 by C. K. Ogden) will be the lingua franca of the world. Local coinage will be replaced by the "air-dollar"--valued at one cubic metre weighing ten kilograms and traveling 200 kilometres at 100 km.p.h. By 1965 Wells reaches the bottom of his stocking, triumphantly extracts the Modern World-State as a going concern.

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