Around this nucleus, technological civilization is rebuilt, with the pilots and other skilled technicians eventually seizing worldwide power and sweeping away the remnants of the old nation states.

A benevolent dictatorship is set up, paving the way for world peace by abolishing national divisions, enforcing the English language, promoting scientific learning, and outlawing religion.

Though his story is a work of fiction, several of Wells' short-term predictions from Shape would come true, such as the aerial bombing of whole cities (which was presented in more detail than in his previous book The War in the Air) and the eventual development of weapons of mass destruction.

A frame story claims that the book is Wells' edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr. Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106 and wrote down what he could recall of it.

Wells' Second World War breaks out in January 1940 with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a violent clash between Germans and Poles at Danzig - closely matching the actual outbreak of WWII.

In actuality, the Spanish Civil War - a particular strong manifestation of these violent passions - would begin two years after the book's publication.

However, Wells wrongly thought that land fighting would quickly bog down, as in World War I, and that tanks would prove completely ineffective.

In Wells' future, submarines become the launching pads for "air torpedoes" (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) carrying weapons of mass destruction.

The Second World War ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of both involved and neutral countries, all affected by the deepening economic crisis.

The dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca and eradicates all religions, setting the world on the road to a utopia.

The abolition of Islam is carried out by the Air Police, who "descend upon Mecca and close down the main holy places", apparently without major incident.

The visionary Gustave de Windt, setting out the blueprint for the coming "Modern State", rejects "The Principle of Opposition", which by definition rules out parliamentary democracy.

The book notes that many people who were Fascists or Nazis in their early years had become staunch adherents of the Modern State in the more mature part of their lives.

With the rise of the Modern State, Russia has a bloodless takeover by the pilots and other skilled technicians, who displace the Communist Party bureaucrats.

Altogether, of the three competing systems of government (democracy, fascism and communism), only the last would be remembered by Wells's Modern State as having been a predecessor.

When the Modern State finds it necessary to sentence people to death, the condemned person is given a lethal "tabloid" and is allowed to choose the moment and the location for taking it.

Though not explicitly mentioned, this aspect of Wells' vision of the future was clearly inspired by the well-known episode of the end of the philosopher Socrates, who - when condemned to death in ancient Athens - took hemlock and died, surrounded by his friends and discoursing of philosophy to his last moment.

[2] As noted by Nathaniel Ward,[3] The Shape of Things to Come was published two years after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Wells notes that as Huxley, "one of the most brilliant of the reactionary writers, foretold of them, [the leaders of the Dictatorship of the Air] tidied up the world".

Much of Shape of Things to Come is devoted to demonstrating that given time, an elite with control of world education can make such a society of intelligent and assertive "Alphas" harmonious and functional, without an underclass.

H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a low-budget Canadian space opera film first released in May 1979, presented itself as a sequel and adaptation.

Specifically, Wein speculated that Wells' character of social scientist Gustave De Windt, with his blueprint for world transformation, had inspired Asimov's Hari Seldon.

Further, Wein conjectured that Wells' "seventeen million active workers" tasked with a "Fundamental Knowledge System" containing "everything that is known" had inspired Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica.

[7] In Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory" (1941), the planes of the International Patrol overfly Washington D.C., and put to naught the President's authority - an event similar to an episode earlier depicted in Wells' work.