2% Pattern of Prediction

171
economic and social organisation is
satisfactory.
l Technical progress undergoes a con-
siderable slowing down; or, on the
contrary, a speeding up.
l Work motivation decreases. Tradi-
tional morals valorising effort are
superseded by a value for immediate
satisfaction. Unemployment increases,
together with the governments social
expenditure - a redistribution of
revenue takes place-taxes increase. Or,
on the contrary, the motivation to work
remains stable, etc. . . .
o A desire for liberty but also for
belonging to a group, for assimilation,
emerges very strongly; or, on the con-
trary, the desire for liberty becomes
blunted in the presence of other
expectations.
The detailed definition of the hypo-
thetical situation is expressed by a set of
evaluations concerning the input. Start-
ing with these hypotheses, the output-
the indicators-acquires values that
express a given situation-for instance,
in 1980. The aspects of this situation are
established and allow comparisons with
other conjectured situations.
The interest of this type of research is,
first, to oblige one to conceive detailed
and coherent hypotheses; then, to
analyse and compare the resulting
situations, and even continually to
contest the logic which led to these
situations. That is why the experiment is
educational.
Henri Bianchi, Centre de Recherches Science
et Vie, Paris.
The Pattern of Prediction 1763-1973
H. G. WELLS: EXPONENT OF
EXTRAPOLATION
I. F. Clarke
H. G. Wells combined an unusual gift for creative vision with the logical mind
of a scientist. Facts and fantasy used to discern the probable direction of human
development in the context of the whole world and beyond made the Wellsian
vision of the future a major factor in making men think about the need to
prepare for the changes that lay ahead.
WITHIN less than a decade-from The
Time Machine in 1895 to Anticipations
in 1902-H. G. Wells established
himself as the true begetter of modern
science fiction and the first exponent of
large-scale social forecasting. He was
both prophet and portent. More than
any other writer before the First World
War he was responsible for encouraging
Professor I. F. Clarke is Head of the English
Studies Department, University of Strathcjyde,
UK.
new attitudes to science and society
Through his fantasies and his more
restrained forecasts he taught the
world how to think in double time-
to see contemporary capabilities as the
first stage in the development of future
possibilities. And he did this in three
ways: through scientific fantasies that
looked into the most varied kinds of
possibility-an invasion from Mars,
the existence of rational creatures on
the moon, the beginnings of atomic
warfare; through precise and elaborate
FUTURES June 1970
172 Ihe Pattern of Prediction
predictions of the ways in which social,
industrial and intellectual innovations
would change the inherited pattern of
society; and through detailed accounts
of the ideal state of a rational, organised
and humane future world.
Wells combined the imagination of
genius with the logical mind of a
scientist. His success as a writer in
different fields depended on the way
his mind could dart from fact to fantasy,
and on the way he could naturalise the
probable by working up from the tap
roots of contemporary knowledge into
the full sunlight of other times and
other places. This unusual gift for
creative vision began to flower at the
Normal School of Science in London
where Wells had the good fortune to
study biology under Darwins friend
and associate, T. H. Huxley. His
training as a biologist gave him a sense
of the universal and irresistible move-
ment in living things; and out of
evolutionary theory he developed the
characteristic Wellsian idea of history
as a sustained process-an unending
advance towards more complex sys-
tems and, he hoped, better worlds of
the future. The entire body of scientific
knowledge served as the raw material
out of which Wells could derive the
most extraordinary fantasies of time
and space, or in which he could
discern the probable direction of human
development on this planet.
For these reasons the work of H. G.
Wells marks the great divide between
the old ways of predictive fiction and
the modern techniques of forecasting.
His greatest effect in fiction was to
advance extrapolation beyond the stage
of Jules Verne. His method was to use
his stories as a means of plotting the
critical path of probability. The device
of let-us-assume was central to all his
scientific romances. Given a higher
civilisation on Mars, then it followed
that a catastrophic change in environ-
ment might compel the Martians to
carry warfare sunward . . . their only
escape from the destruction that genera-
tion after generation creeps upon
them. The rockets blasted off from
Mars, and the modern stereotype of
the invaders from another planet
began. But it was not, of course, the
Martians who gave Wells cause to
worry. Their fearful weapons were
already potential within Western indus-
trialism; for if technological warfare
were taken to the limit, Wells foresaw
that it would be fought with devices
like the lethal Black Smoke, the Heat
Ray and the tall War Vehicles. He was
right.
In this way Wells brought facts up
to the starting gate with fantasy. Out
of what was apparently the most
unpromising material he developed
exciting narratives that often obliged
the reader to consider the consequences
and the possibilities of future change.
So Lenin learned from a reading of
The Time Machine that human ideas
are based on the scale of the planet
we live in . . . If we succeed in making
contact with other planets, all our
philosophical, social and moral ideas
will have to be revised. From a
reading of The World Set Free anyone
could have learned that the atom
contained a source of power so potent
that a man might carry in his hand the
energy to light a city for a year, fight
a fleet of battleships, or drive one of
our giant liners across the Atlantic.
Long before the mushroom cloud
over Hiroshima it seemed evident to
Wells that the discoveries of Einstein
and Rutherford would force mankind
to choose between good and evil-to
use the atom for the purposes of peace
or of war. Today, almost sixty years
after the appearance of The World Set
Free, it still comes as a surprise to
observe the way in which Wells found
his material in an abstruse scientific
paper by Frederick Soddy in 1909 and
out of it elaborated a forecast of atomic
energy in 1933. By an exceptional leap
of the imagination he described a new
form of warfare and gave the new term,
atomic bomb, to the English language.
FUTURES June 1970
The Pattern of Predictiorl
173
FUTURES June 1970
The First Men in the Moon (1901)-This highly
original fantasy from H. G. Wells that still
reads well. Here Wells allowed himself the
hypothesis that there might be life on the moon
and went on to describe the kind of rational
animal that could live there in the known
biological conditions.
Figure 1. Two space explorers in their late-
Victorian capsule hover in free fall as the
moon comes nearer.
Figure 2. Cavor, the scientist, explains how the
wireless works to the Selenites. Note how the
illustrator is quite incapable of matching the
scientific element of the story with images of
the creatures Wells describes in the text.
174 The Pattern of Prediction
The War ofthe Worlds (1898)-This was
the most famous of Wellss many
imaginative fantasies. It depended on a
single supposition-the possibility that
a more advanced technological society
might exist on Mars and might one day
be obliged to invade Earth.
Figure 3. A member of the species
Mart& sapiens emerges from the space
capsule that brought him to earth. The
first image in a now familiar fantasy-
the fear that we might not be alone
in the universe.
FUTURES June 1970
The Pat&n of Prediction
175
By the spring of 1959, he wrote, A Modern Utopia, he showed how to
from nearly two hundred centres, and
every week added to their number,
avoid the muddle: The plain message
physical science has for the world at
roared the unquenchable crimson con-
flagrations of the atomic bombs . . .
large is this, that were our political
Most of the capital cities of the world
and social and moral devices only as
were burning; millions of people had
well contrived to their end as a linotype
machine . . . there need now at the
already perished, and over great areas present moment be no appreciable toil
government was at an end. in the world.
That verdict of no confidence on
mans ability to profit from scientific
discovery came from one side of
Wellss brain. Although he wrote so
much about time-to-come, he was not
a simple-minded optimist. Many of his
stories were marked by a deep pessi-
mism, and he died despairing of the
future because he feared that men
lack the self-control to direct the
affairs of our planet in a rational way.
Reason and emotion joined in Wells
to make him hate everything that
prevented the human being from
living the fullest and most satisfactory
life possible.
At the back of all his thinking was
the vision of an ideal, scientific under-
standing of life. Follow reason, he
suggested, discover the best means of
social organisation, and the future
would look after itself. And so, he
designed his utopias to show what men
could do, if they would only rid them-
selves of prejudice and ignorance. In
one story, In the Days of the Comet, he
lamented the shams and failures of his
world : Here were we British, forty-one
millions of people, in a state of almost
indescribably aimless economic and
moral muddle that we had neither the
courage, the energy, nor the intelli-
gence to improve. In his most ela-
borate scheme for a better world,
This was the traditional if only
message of all utopian literature, but
there were important differences that
made Wells the most acclaimed utopian
propagandist of his day; for he always
wrote in the context of the single
world state made possible by modern
communications, and he always saw
his ideal state as a dynamic system that
would change with the times. In this
way he aroused the enthusiasm of his
contemporaries who saw in his books
the reflection of that improved state
of society towards which all things
were moving. In tales such as A Modem
Utopia and The Shape of Things to Come
he proclaimed the happy union of
politics with technology, and of indi-
vidual spontaneity with social subordi-
nation. For this the critics called him
naive; and they often accused him-
with good reason at times-of failing
to make allowances for human de-
pravity. Although the horrors of the
Nazi gas chambers and the brutalities
of the police states denied the hopes of
his utopias, the Wellsian vision of the
future proved to be a major factor in
making men give thought to the need
to prepare for the changes that lay
ahead. I f technological forecasters are
looking for a founding father, they can
find example and warning in the life
and works of H. G. Wells.
FUTURES June 1870