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Herbert George Wells might be called the Great Prognosticator. His first purportedly non-fiction bestseller, published in 1901and originally subtitled ‘”An Experiment In Prophecy.” envisions a world slightly less than a millennium in his future.

As such, it can be suspected of strong science fiction tendencies – at least under the definition provided by R.A. Heinlein who said it was:

“”realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.”

His first foray as modern Nostradamus produced a surprising number of ‘hits – the advent of trains and cars, leading to the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and of a union of European nations – but also some clunking ‘misses’ – he didn’t expect a successful aeroplane before 1950, and confessed that:

“my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea”.

The early novels began with “The Time Machine” (1895) followed by “The Island of Dr. Moreau“, “The Invisible Man“,”The Sleeper Awakes” (on which Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” movie was loosely based) and “The First Men On The Moon“. Each title was published approximately a year apart and all (except “Awakes”) have bedd adapted for the visual media, often more than once.

In addition, his CV contained contained equally-acclaimed but more ‘realistic’ works such as “Tono Bungay” and “Kipps“. Over and through all this is a fair sprinkling of novellas and short stories – one of which, “The New Accelerator“, was allegedly the inspiration for episode 66 of “Star Trek” (”The Wink Of An Eye).

Arguably his greatest work of crystal-ball-gazing was 1914’s “The World Set Free“. A major motif in Wells’ work is energy and technology and their influence on humanity. The opening of “The World Set Free” makes this focus explicit:

“The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal.”

Having a working knowledge of physics and being aware of the work of the Oxford group (William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford and Fred Soddy) in splitting atoms of uranium, proposed that inducing similar radioactive reactions in the heavy elements would result in a bomb no more instantaneously destructive than, say, T.N.T. – but one which wouldn’t stop exploding.

Logical reflection would have made it obvious that it was impossible for any bomb to “exlode continuously”; it would simply consume itself.

The prophetic nature of the book lies elsewhere:

“Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…

“All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape…

“Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it… Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.”

Among the more terrifying world-pictures which were envisioned by Wells is one to be found in Chapter 10 of “The Shape Of Things To Come“. Written in 1933, it purports to recount the history of the world up to 2106.

It is, thus, future history like Issac Asimov’s Foundation series, although, retrospectively-speaking, it becomes an alternate history after 1933, as Hitler and Roosevelt fail to kick-start their economies. The Depression, therefore, is sustained for another three decades.!

Wells predicted World War Two – ‘begun’ by a Pole in 1940 and running concurrently with the Depression – but extended it (to 1960). The conclusion was enforced – by microbes. And as many good armies do, these tiny troopers made repeated assaults to soften up the enemy before the Big One:

“The first line of advance consisted of a variety of influenza’s that were highly infectious and impossible to control under war conditions. The depleted strength of the belligerent populations, a depletion due to their reduced and dis organised nourishment and the collapse of their sanitary services gave these infections full scope…

“[the ] lowering of the general vitality was far more important than the actual mortality. Cholera and and bubonic plague followed and then…masculated fever….It discoloured the face and skin produced a violent fever, cutaneous irritation and extreme mental distress.

Only Nature manages to bring the curtain down on this seeming-Armageddon, coming to save Mankind with “a pitiless but antiseptic Winter” – after half world’s population had been mortally stricken.

Another aspect that intrigued Wells was the unending ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ debate. Written in 1896, it was also influenced by the heated atmosphere generated within the scientific community by the practice of vivisection (defined in the Encyclopedia Britannica as an “operation on a living animal for experimental rather than healing purposes”).

It was a debate which reached the lawmakers. The Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act was passed by Westminster in 1822, to be repealed and replaced by the Cruel Animals Act – the former an unprecedented animal protection law, the latter the very first effort at regulating animal testing (enthusiastically promoted by Darwin).

“The Island of Dr. Moreau” has a shipwreck rescuee taken to an island where, stranded, he learns of, begins(and, in the end, is forced) to tolerate Moreau’s ghastly secret. He has been experimenting on animals to refashion then into humans, inflicting pain solely to quench scientific curiosity.

All those still human die before he manages to escape from the island. On returning to urban life, and echoing Swift’s Gulliver, he now finds other people nearly intolerable (fearing them of sudden metamorphoses to beasts) so becomes a star-gazing loner.

In 1936, in another astonishing and hawk-eyed example of insight, he called for the institution of an organically-evolving World Encyclopedia, open to all and to be reviewed by established authorities. He dreamed of

“…a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.”

While clearly pre-saging the massively-distributed networks system that is the Web, it is not completely congruent with the current scenario. Demanding egalitarian and universal access to knowledge, the vision also mandated a synthetic maturation, a rational melding, of this knowledge as well as a mechanism of directing it, a review board, if you will.

The Internet has no universally acceptable and authoritative agents for these nor, at present, the wherewithal to enforce and ‘police’ it. Sites such as Wikipedia may be said to be close but that is all it is.

Mechanisms such as Tom-Dick-and-Harry entries to the pool of knowledge must, by their very nature, prove a minefield for the ignorant and unwary whilst being a paradisaical wonderland for the malice-minded. Peer review , unrestricted by measures of competence, has repeatedly proved to be of insufficient robustness to be able to counter this.