Past Future: Anticipations

“…Wells was a prophet, not merely in the popular sense of having predicted space travel, processed food and the Common Market, but in the wider sense of being able to think in a completely new way about the future---to be, as it were, at home in the future.”
Roslynn D. Haynes

“Something in us pursues information and data with some passion, but the soul is always eager to hear another story.” Thomas Moore

To remember the future, anticipate the past...

The idea of applying scientific principles to anticipate the future was not new when 1970s futurists claimed it as their defining and innovative procedure. Nor was it new when RAND and Herman Kahn started up their computers in the 1950s.

This approach to the future, re-discovered in the middle of the 20th century, had been proposed and applied as the century began. At that time it was the work of one man: H.G. Wells.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Wells was known for his novels and short stories, many of which he described as “scientific romances.” These include the classics for which he is most remembered in the 21st century, such as The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

But he became famous in his own time as the result of a series of magazine articles on the future. They were published in England and the United States in 1901, and collected the following year in a book, titled Anticipations. It was a surprise success, outselling any of his novels.

Wells described a future dominated by big fast cars, long-distance buses and fat trucks traveling on wide asphalt highways, passing mega-cities and prefabricated suburban communities of air-conditioned homes filled with labor-saving appliances, along a solid sprawl spread unbounded from Boston to Washington, D.C.

Futurama 1939

This was still the future in 1939, when Futurama showed it at the New York World’s Fair. But Wells foresaw it before Henry Ford had sold a single Model T, or London had a single motorized bus.

Wells foresaw electric appliances and other labor saving devices in homes, when English homes were lit by coal gas lamps, or even oil lamps and candles.  He also saw social ramifications: the end of house servants, the beginning of keeping up with the Jones.

He saw darkness in the future as well: a series of major and highly mechanized wars. The next war would feature the “land ironclads” (or tanks, also not yet invented.) As soon as mid-century, war would be dominated by aircraft, flying in formation in large numbers. He was writing two years or so before the Wright Brothers demonstrated a successful airplane.

Victory will depend on expertise and planning, but he also envisioned the ghastly consequences for soldiers, with a vocabulary that eerily anticipates words later written by poets and novelists who were soldiers in World War I: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen.”

But in the far future Wells saw nations coming together in common markets and then in a world state.

These were not wild prophecies, but based on Wells’ wide reading. The book covers economics and class, forms of government, education, science, journalism and structures of social relationships and families, including improvement in the status of women. From the perspective of the actual future he got a lot wrong, and a few things wrong-headed (his advocacy of eugenics, for instance) that he needed to correct later. But in terms of the study of the future, Anticipations sets several standards.

“What made the book so successful was the willingness of the author to look at alternative futures,” writes Wells biographer David C. Smith, “to discuss his ideas with his readers, and to invite them to participate in his work of future-making.”

So Wells presaged alternative futures and participatory or democratic futures all at once. Even more basically, he made a case for the scientific study of the future, long before the 70s futurists.

He articulated this argument most elaborately in a speech, also in 1902, that was subsequently published as The Discovery of the Future.

He developed a daring thesis that the future can be foreseen, with at least the same accuracy as we know the past. “And the question arises how far this absolute ignorance of the future is a fixed and necessary condition of human life, and how far some application of intellectual methods may not attenuate even if it does not absolutely set aside the veil between ourselves and things to come. And I am venturing to suggest to you that along certain lines and with certain qualifications and limitations a working knowledge of things in the future is a possible and practicable thing.”

We can know as much about the future as about the past, he argued. Our knowledge of the past depends on partial information, inference and interpretation. As new information is uncovered, old information given new weight and relevance, and as interpretations change, so does our picture of the past.

This is especially true, he said, of the 19th century’s exploration of the remote past, such as the geological ages. Evidence is sparse, yet inferences can be made.
“...it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward,” to see the future as well as we see the deep past, using the same basic inductive methods. Such a vision of the future would be “infinitely more important to mankind” than even the view of the past that transformed 19th century thought.

It would be a scientific undertaking, he insisted. He reminded his audience that all science is ultimately about the future: a theory of gravity predicts what will happen when someone throws an object into the air, anytime in the future. The theories that result from scientific analysis of facts are tested by their ability to yield “confident forecasts.”

The key to forecasting the future is to combine scientific predictions of separate phenomena—including even “so unscientific a science as economics.” If “first-class minds” did something like that, couldn’t they create “an ordered picture of the future that will be just as certain, just as strictly science, and perhaps just as detailed as the picture that has been built up within the last hundred years of the geological past?”

Such forecasts would be useful in guiding present actions. There is “no reason why we should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and serviceable generalizations upon countless important issues in the human destiny.”

“I must confess that I believe quite firmly that an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility,” Wells asserted as his lecture reached its climax. “I believe that the time is drawing near when it will be possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future.”

Wells’ speech was widely praised, and together with Anticipations, made him “a mind and a force to be reckoned with,” biographer Smith wrote. “He had become a great man.”

But no one seemed to take up the challenge to develop a scientific study of the future—not until the idea was rediscovered a half century later.

Wells himself wrote many more non-fiction books, all of them in one way or another expressing his vision of things to come. He had announced this commitment that guided the rest of his long career in The Discovery of the Future. He divided those who find their direction in the past, from those who look to the future. The past-oriented look for causes, the future-oriented for possible effects. “…the main dispute even in most modern wars…will be found to be a reference, not to the future, but to the past…”

The difference defines divergent ideas of a person’s purpose in life. One sees it as ”simply to reap the consequences of the past,” while the other believes “our life is to prepare the future.”

It was clear which Wells was going to be. “Yet though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference to consequence to our morality, it is still the past that dominates our lives. But why? Why are we so bound to it? It is into the future we go, to-morrow is the eventful thing for us.”

But in championing the future Wells did not restrict himself to articles, commentaries, non-fiction books and speeches. He returned to fiction, including many novels about the future. Some of his fictions were also eerily accurate about the future within his lifetime, but he did no more systematic forecasting as he began to do in Anticipations.

One reason could be that in fairly short order, he realized there were limitations to a scientific study of the future.

Partly because of the stir that the Anticipations articles created in the United States, Wells was invited for a lecture tour. He went, and subsequently wrote a book, The Future in America, published in 1906. There he retreated on his claims for a “scientific sort of prophecy,” admitting that his The Discovery of the Future lecture “went altogether too far in this direction.”

" Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts and will of unique incalculable men,” he wrote. “With them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to be not 'scientific' at all for all the greater issues, the humanly-important issues, but critical, literary, even—if you will—artistic. Here insight is of more account than induction and the perception of fine tones than the counting of heads.”

The artistic method he often chose—the method he returned to—was storytelling. In addition to the “perception of fine tones” there are other decisive features of stories that make them our portals into alternative futures.


Story, writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist as well as an English professor, “is the fundamental instrument of thought.”

Story is also “our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, of explaining.”

“We look for stories in everything. If stones are thrown on the ground, they make a story," observed novelist Brian Kitely. "Consciousness is a story. It is a condensing of the world’s details into narrative.”

“Knowledge is stories,” writes Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Explanations in science itself tend to be narratives, even beyond the basic story of the if/then statement. “Science is the storytelling of our time,” asserts William Irwin Thompson. “By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here.”

As worthy and useful as futures studies might be, they are not what "the future" means to most people. Neither jargon-propelled generalities nor carefully couched projections and matrices quite get to the texture of life, to the quality of the future, the smell of it. Nor can they set up a realistic dynamic that makes room for behavior, emotion, creativity, spontaneity, instinct, dedication, insight, perception, perverseness, influence, aspiration, faith, courage, learning, intent, love, hope, imagination…in a word, soul.

Producing that kind of scenario is not really the futurist's role. That's the job of the storyteller.

In envisioning a future, stories can better provide the human element through characters and their emotions. This adds a necessary complexity to these futures.

Story can provide motivation and points of view. They can expose various self-interests. By showing effects on characters it adds the crucial condition of emotion, of human reaction and response.

Stories can explore consequences on the individuals and groups they tell us about. Stories can dramatize challenge and costs to society and individuals, and suggest qualities of mind and spirit needed to confront those consequences, to meet those challenges.

Stories can place a future in several layered contexts—the personal, interpersonal, cultural, and societal. They can place the future in the context of time—of present and pasts. They can suggest the context of an entire world.

In his fictions, H.G. Wells exemplified all of this. In her study of the influence of science on Wells’ writing, Roslynn D. Haynes concluded, “Thus Wells tends not to examine scientific principles per se, but their effect on individual characters and their causal implications for society or mankind as a whole.”

Since stories appear to be how we think and how we learn, they also have the advantage of seizing our attention, and remaining in our memories. Reports clotted with number and levels of probabilities, snowstorms of data plowed with arcane instruments of analysis, plus charts and graphs of dubious usefulness, aren’t likely to give many people a picture of the future. Nor much hope for the future either, beyond anticipating getting to the end of them and going out for ice cream.

But something that reaches almost everyone is a story. Stories may provide a sense of one alternative future, but more than that, stories suggest meanings. When we experience a story, feel what the characters feel, we get some sense of what the complex essence, what the soul of such a future might be.

Stories can’t do it all, any more than a scientific report or a comprehensive description. Stories are limited by their form, and by the skills of the storyteller. They have beginnings and endings, and concentrate on significant events. They may use analogy, irony, paradox. Or they may be quite a bit cruder in their effects. But they have definite advantages in considering the future.

They link with other stories and archetypal themes that suggest humanity’s deepest desires, fears and aspirations. In bringing us into the story and helping us to identify with characters, they offer the possibility of empathy, not only with our potential future selves in a given alternative future, but also with others.

That is a crucial element in the kind of systems thinking that was a cornerstone of 1970s futurism. According to one author on the subject, “the systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another.”

Some stories hope to tell us what future to avoid. Others suggest how we need to change to get to a future we need. Futurist Willis Harman noted: “The most carefully designed social measures will not achieve their desired goals unless they involve not only rationally designed programs and structures, but also changes in deep-rooted beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns.”

“There is only one crisis in the world,” wrote futurist John Platt. “It is the crisis of transformation.” Stories can help us get to where we need to be.

In the end, all we actually have of the past or future are the stories we tell ourselves. So stories also reflect back to us what we feel about the future in general, or one or another alternative tomorrows.

The rest of this series will concentrate on such stories, their contexts and ramifications, as reflections of how we think and feel about the future.

Most of these stories are widely known and shared, many have historical significance, and a few are lesser known but just as indicative. They tend to be foundation stories—the first or best known, in print or as movies or television—of a particular kind, representing a significant view of the future. In many cases, other stories like them followed, including those still being told.

But fair warning: even the well known stories may not always be ones that usually get classified as foundation stories of the future, or of particular approaches to the future. Analysis of the literature, for example, doesn’t always include bug-eyed monster movies of the 1950s, Star Trek: The Next Generation or the American Indian Ghost Dance movement of the 1890s.

We begin with the foundation story of “the future” itself. For several years before he wrote the now forgotten Anticipations, H.G. Wells proposed and dramatized the basic idea of “the future” we have accepted ever since. Not in any essay or exegesis, but in a story that has been read and remembered for well over a century. Before Wells invented futurism, he invented the future.

This future begins with the personal. Its roots are found in a dingy house in an obscure village outside London, where Bertie Wells was born in the mid-19th century. So why did the son of two former servants start thinking about the future?

 Because his life depended on it.

to be continued...