Masterworks Spotlight: The Shape of Things to Come

Our featured SF Masterwork is a prescient look at mankind’s future from the greatest science fiction writer of them all.

When a diplomat dies in the 1930s, he leaves behind a book of ‘dream visions’ he has been experiencing, detailing events that will occur on Earth for the next two hundred years.

This fictional ‘account of the future’ – in a similar vein to Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, published three years earlier – proved prescient in many ways, as Wells predicted events such as the Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare and climate change.

The Shape of Things to Come is available as an SF Masterworks paperback and an SF Gateway eBook.

You can find more of HG Wells’ works via his Author page on the Gateway website and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.