"A Story of the Days To Come" is a novella

Novella

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

 by H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

 comprising five chapters that was first published in the June to October 1897 issues of The Pall Mall Magazine

The Pall Mall Magazine

The Pall Mall Magazine was a monthly British literary magazine published between 1893 and 1914. Started by William Waldorf Astor as an offshoot of the Pall Mall Gazette, the magazine included poetry, short stories, serialized fiction, and general commentaries, along with extensive artwork...

. It was later included in a 1899 collection of Wells's short stories, Tales of Space and Time

Tales of Space and Time

Tales of Space and Time is a fantasy and science fiction collection of three short stories and two novellas written by the English author H. G. Wells between 1897 and 1898. It was first published by Doubleday & McClure Co. in 1899...

.

The chapter titles are:

• "The Cure for Love"
• "The Vacant Country"
• "The Ways of the City"
• "Underneath"
• "Bindon Intervenes"

The novella depicts two lovers in a dystopian future London of the 22nd century. They explore the implications of excessive urbanization, class warfare, and advances in the technology of medicine, communication, transportation, and agriculture. Like "When the Sleeper Wakes", published in the same year, the stories extrapolate the trends Wells observed in nineteenth-century Victorian London two hundred years into the future.

The London of the early 22nd century is over 30 million people in population, with the lower classes living in subterranean dwellings, and the middle and upper classes living in skyscrapers and largely communal accommodations. Moving walkways interconnect the city, with fast air-travel and superhighways available between cities. The countryside is largely abandoned.

Plot summary

A wealthy heiress falls in love with a middle-class worker of romantically quaint disposition. In part one, the woman's father hires a hypnotist to program his daughter to instead choose a more appropriate suitor selected by him. When that plot is unraveled, the couple secretly marry and flee into the abandoned countryside and attempt to live off the land. After being driven back into the city, the couple live a modest middle-class lifestyle until their money runs out. At that point, they move to the "underneath" area of London to toil in physical labor as lower-class workers. Finally, their issues are resolved through the machinations of her spurned would-be suitor, and they resume a middle-class lifestyle.

Among other things, this short story appears to anticipate technical developments toward massive urbanization, skyscrapers, moving sidewalks, superhighways, and intercontinental aircraft traveling at jet speeds.

Socially and economically, however, it predicts a very stratified class structure and a largely communistic society where few mega-corporations control all means of production

Means of production

Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...

. It also predicts hypnosis as a supplement or replacement to psychology, "creches" where child-rearing is transferred from parents to professionals, and a megapolis

Megapolis

Megapolis is a variant of the word megalopolis, meaning a large city or urban area.Megapolis may also refer to:* Megapolis Festival, an annual audio arts festival in the United States.* Prajay Megapolis, a large housing estate in Hyderabad, India....

 served by city-wide moving walkway

Moving walkway

A moving walkway or moving sidewalk is a slow moving conveyor mechanism that transports people, across a horizontal...

s and escalators, with enormous cities (four in England) separated by abandoned countryside.

External links

• "A Story of the Days To Come" in Tales of Space and Time. University of Newcastle, Australia.