“I warned you, damn fools” – Weekend – Kommersant

HG Wells has remained in history one of the most successful science fiction predictions in terms of the number of predictions that came true: according to researchers, about 80% of the technologies he described were somehow brought to life – from automatic doors to space flights. It is much less often remembered that, in addition to various technologies, HG Wells predicted both world wars (the second – almost within a year) and spent a lot of effort to ensure that these predictions did not come true. To the 115th anniversary of the novel “War in the Air”, which predicted the First World War, Uliana Volokhova tells how HG Wells tried to warn mankind against wars, but admitted defeat.

1. Invasion

In 1897, the British Pearson’s Magazine and the American The Cosmopolitan published The War of the Worlds by HG Wells, by that time already a well-known writer who had managed to release several bestsellers. In the new book, the famous science fiction writer described how the Martians landed on Earth to destroy human civilization. Wells addressed the topic of war for the first time, although there was no more topical topic in British literature during this period. This was the era of the incredible popularity of “invasion literature”: bookstores were filled with novels about how some European country (more often Germany, the militarization of which neuroticized contemporaries) invades England and captures it without any problems. For the most part, the purpose of these works was to convince the British of the need to build up the country’s defenses. Wells’ novel was also set in present-day England, but the enemy looked unexpected, which took the popular theme to a new level.

Critics vied with each other to praise Wells for the originality of the idea and the skill of its implementation, called the novel “astonishingly believable” and noted that “never before has scientific data been so skillfully woven into fiction.” Before Wells, aliens rarely appeared in popular culture, and certainly never landed on Earth to conquer it. A new turn captured contemporaries: The War of the Worlds was reprinted in many magazines, and serialized sequels by other authors began to appear in Europe and the United States, in which humanity was still building up its defenses and trying to take revenge on the invaders.

Wells was discouraged by this reading. First of all, he wrote not about the Martians and the fight against them, but about people. A convinced Darwinist, he looked at the history of mankind through the prism of the theory of interspecies competition and tried to hint to people on the need to be more careful in the struggle for resources: “We must remember how mercilessly people themselves destroyed not only animals, such as the extinct bison and dodo bird, but also themselves similar. The inhabitants of Tasmania, for example, were annihilated before the last war of extermination in 50 years started by immigrants from Europe. The Martians were only a means to show humanity its true face (“Are we such champions of mercy ourselves that we can resent the Martians who acted in the same spirit?”) And teach him a lesson. The novel was supposed to make people think about themselves, but instead they began to invent new weapons to take revenge on would-be invaders. “Perhaps this is not so much outright villainy as a terrible mistake,” wrote Wells in The Critic magazine and for almost a decade gave up trying to talk to readers on military topics.

2. Plaque

In 1908, the novel “War in the Air” was published – this time without aliens, Wells directly described the world war that begins in the 1910s and practically destroys human civilization. According to the plot, Germany receives at its disposal the drawings of an innovative flying machine (five years before the publication of the novel, the Wright brothers made the first successful flight on an airplane in history) and starts a war that quickly develops into a world war. As a result of air bombardments, the usual life was completely destroyed – there were no states left, there was no one to conclude peace treaties, humanity was thrown back several centuries ago. A simple conclusion from this is made by one of the surviving heroes: “There was no need to start a war.”

Unlike “War of the Worlds”, the new novel was received coolly. First of all, it didn’t look fantastic at all. A few months before publication, the German inventor Count von Zeppelin built a new airship that could stay in the air for eight hours and fly almost 400 km – halfway to England. German magazines were filled with belligerent cartoons of England sleeping peacefully in the shadow of a gigantic flying machine. The prospect of air war as described by Wells was as real as ever. Against this background, Wells’ anti-war pathos seemed out of place – readers were much more worried about the current defense capability of the country than the future of mankind.

Again unheard by anyone, Wells made a third attempt to convince people of the need to prevent the catastrophe by all means. In early 1914, he published The World Set Free, this time deciding not to scare readers too much with pictures of the apocalypse, but to focus on a positive agenda. In the new novel, humanity invented nuclear weapons, a world war began, but it did not last long – after several bombings, as a result of which the governments and military headquarters of all the warring powers were destroyed, humanity realized that it was two steps away from self-destruction and began negotiations to unite peace and stop interstate strife.

To what extent the new approach was effective, the author did not have a chance to find out: six months after its release, the world war, about which Wells had warned for so long, finally began.

3. Offensive

Much of what Wells predicted in The War of the Worlds and The War in the Air was realized in World War I. The chemical weapons that the Martians used to poison earthlings turned into gas attacks, armored vehicles of aliens embodied in tanks that destroy everything in their path, aviation bombed cities for the first time in history, not yet causing great destruction, but already instilling fear in civilians.

Paradoxically, Wells himself had certain hopes for the war. Her attack was terrible, but now people had to see what a threat she posed, and begin to behave more sensibly. Shortly after it began, he published a collection of articles, The War to End Wars, in which he accused the governments of major countries of starting the war, but at the same time suggested that its end would be marked by the fact that ordinary people would finally take their fate into their own hands and achieve lasting peace on the basis of laws common to all countries, and ideally they will create a single state altogether. The establishment of the League of Nations and the attempts of the Western powers to unite to prevent hostilities in the future inspired a certain optimism – so much so that Wells even temporarily abandoned forecasting the future and turned to history. In 1919 he published A History of Civilizations, one of the first attempts at transnational history. Mankind, Wells tried to prove, is united in its development, goes through the same stages, faces the same problems, therefore “the idea of ​​the unity of the human race should embrace all minds, and the concept of humanity as a single family should become the subject of universal education.”

The post-war euphoria did not last long: already in the early 1930s it became completely clear that the unification of all mankind across national borders was being postponed. In 1933, after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Wells returns to thinking about the future of mankind and writes the novel The Shape of Things to Come. Without even trying to hide real countries and politicians behind allusions and fictitious names, Wells again warned people about the coming world war. The story was very clear: unable to cope with the economic crisis, Hitler invaded Poland in January 1940, the world war begins again, this time it has been going on for more than ten years and ends with the defeat of all countries – the opponents are so exhausted that it is simply impossible to determine the winner. Due to the bacteriological weapons that were used during the war, the world is engulfed in an epidemic of “vagrant fever”, which finally destroys civilization. Well, or almost completely: aviators take power over a small handful of survivors, who lay the foundations of a future just society.

4. Defeat

In the real world, World War II began a few months earlier than Wells predicted: Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. While the so-called strange war was going on, during which England was at war with Germany, but there were practically no hostilities between the countries, Wells did not lose hope that a full-scale war could still be avoided, and in the book The New World Order, published in early 1940, once again called on the people to consolidate. This time it’s just about basic human rights: to food, to education, to be paid for volunteer work, to share resources, to legal protection, to freedom of movement, not to be unjustly deprived of liberty, not to be tortured, not be misled. After the end of the Second World War, this book became one of 18 texts used in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This, however, happened after Wells’ death.

Then, in May 1940, the new war nevertheless became a world war, and Wells fell into despair. In 1941, The War in the Air was reprinted, for which Wells rewrote the foreword. Now it ended like this: “Once again I ask the reader to pay attention to the warnings that I gave. Do I have anything to add to them? Perhaps nothing but my epitaph: “I warned you, damn fools.”

In early 1945, HG Wells published his last work, the 30-page essay “Reason at the Limit”, in which the 79-year-old writer, who did not yet know about the creation of a nuclear bomb in the United States, again wrote about the premonition of the imminent end of mankind. “A series of events makes the reasonable observer realize that human history has come to an end and that homo sapiens, as it liked to call itself, has lost in its current form. <...> And yet my character makes me doubt that even a small number of people will not live to see the inevitable end of the world.

Wells died on August 13, 1946, a year after the United States used the nuclear weapons he predicted in the war, and a little over two years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, inspired by him, was adopted.

---

Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram