Things to Come

Things to Come is the 1936 release of London Films, produced from the 1935 “film story” by H.G. Wells, the text of the present work. The book includes more than 100 illustrations, most of them publicity stills that are all the more relevant because Wells, for a script writer, had unusual control over the actual film production. The images are very much a direct expression of his film story.
Done at age 70, Things to Come reflects on a long literary career, in both fiction and nonfiction, often given to the fate of man and the prospect of a unified world state, a utopian future realized in the film by A.D. 2036. That is what is coming: the end of warfare between belligerent nation states. Now the new frontier of human conquest is space, begun at film’s end with the first firing of a gigantic space gun.

The late Leon Stover, professor emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was the first to bring science fiction to the college curriculum and was the author of numerous landmarks of intellectual history. He lived in Chicago.

H.G. Wells
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 271
Bibliographic Info: 103 photos, annotations, appendices, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2012 [2007]
pISBN: 978-0-7864-6877-5
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The Annotated H.G. Wells

Preface      x
Introduction      1

1. The Title      1
2. The Text      1
3. The Story      4
4. Future Perfect      5
5. Left and Right      7
6. Days to Come      9

Things to Come (1935)      11
(Annotated text of the London first edition)      14

Appendices
I. The Things to Come Press Book, by Leon Stover      205
II. “The Silliest Film: Will Machinery Make Robots of Men?” (1927), by H.G. Wells      207
III. “The Land Ironclads” (1903), by H.G. Wells      215
IV. “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” (1932), by H.G. Wells      237
Bibliography: Stover on Wells      257
Index      259

“Wells’s masterpieces get the red-carpet treatment here in these luxurious editions…academic collections supporting English departments should definitely invest in this volume”—Library Journal; “Stover is to be thanked for his years of Wellsian scholarship”—Public Library Quarterly; “Stover, by presenting the intellectual underpinnings of Wells’ work, has provided a powerful tool for understanding his writings, one sees them more deeply, without losing that earlier sense-of-wonder that originally opened the vistas of the young reader’s mind…a crucial guide to these classics of science fiction”—Fosfax; “two cheers for Stoverism…formidable scholarship…serious students of Wells would be foolish to ignore ‘Stoverism’”—The Wellsian; “Stover should be commended for a painstaking and meticulous editorial commentary”—Utopian Studies; “extensively annotated and analyzed by Stover…annotations are filled with insights into Wells’ writings and philosophy”—C&RL News.