Anticipations (book)
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| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Original title | Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher |
Harper & Brothers (US) Chapman & Hall (UK) |
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Publication date
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November 1901 |
| Pages | 342 |
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, generally known as Anticipations, was written by H.G. Wells at the age of 34. He later called the book, which became a bestseller, "the keystone to the main arch of my work." His most recent biographer, however, calls the volume "both the starting point and the lowest point in Wells's career as a social thinker."
Taking the revolution in transport facilitated by the "mechanical revolution" as his point of departure, Wells told readers they were living through a reorganization of human society that would alter every dimension of life. An academic biographer has described the degree of accuracy of Wells's predictions as "certainly phenomenal."
The chapters of Anticipations appeared in Great Britain in the Fortnightly Review (April–December 1901) and in the United States in the North American Review (June–November 1901), and were published as a book in November 1901. Anticipations was "Wells's first non-fiction bestseller." The volume was reissued by Chapman and Hall in 1914, on the eve of World War I.
Proposing to forecast "the way things will probably go in this new century," Wells's point of departure is "the probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion during the coming decades." Taking the "steam engine running on a railway" to be the most characteristic symbol of the 19th century, he analyzes the historical factors that led it to appear when it did. Wells predicts that "new motor vehicles" will lead to trucks, cars ("motor carriages"), and buses ("the motor omnibus") that will be "segregated" from horse traffic on "special roads" competing with railways.
Wells argues that the speed of land travel stands "in almost fundamental relation to human society." The speeding up of land locomotion will therefore revolutionize human society. Rather than producing even larger cities, a new sort of "human distribution" will be created, with the increase in the distance a worker can travel in an hour acting as a "centrifugal" force leading to a considerable development of "suburbs" while this development is counterbalanced by "centripetal considerations" like a desire for access to shopping districts, good schools, doctors, and "the love of the crowd." The terms "town" and "country" will become obsolete as a new kind of "urban region" develops.
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