Customer Reviews

Anticipations: Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Around the turn of the century, 1901 a famous Sci-fi writer that is well known for predicting the future applies his trade. Instead of taking the word of experts on HG, we get his speculations first hand.

The book starts out innocuously describing how turning a "steam pump" on its side we now have a steam engine. He makes some good points against the wisdom of the time that ideas come together at just the right time to create just the right answer to a problem. From her he speculates on how mechanized transportation will change society. HG is just warming up as he now speculates on government, military and social conscience. He used a term "the new republic to describe his future world.

I may have to take his work on many of the subject but I can relate to his military references. It took the Vietnam War to shake the military up enough to make HG's speculation on an educated well-oiled military that we have today. It was the generals of the time the generals of the Vietnam era that realize that we needed just about everything HG predicted from technical advances to intelligent soldiers to the concept of "Land, Sea, Air" warfare.

Some of his speculations are a met strange or maybe just a tad different. It looks like he thinks that democracy will be exchange for the rule of technocrats. Moreover, he is not too sure of the future domination of the English language.

In any event, this book is well worth reading as it is the core of HG's views of humankind.

The Time Machine, Literary Touchstone Edition

This is what it says it is: a public domain text with navigation that allows the user to easily navigate the entire book, providing forward, backward and cross links to every section of the book. Most public domain texts (and far too many new texts) are just plain texts rendered into the Kindle format. This text was carefully constructed to fit the structure of this book.