by Daniel McPhail
A short while ago, H. G. Wells had a dream of the future which inspired
the writing of his new semi-fantasy book, "The Shape of Things to
Come." It is an outline of the next century and a half, forecasting a
World State eventually after destructive wars. Published by Macmillan.
Wells writes in an almost invisible small hand.
A slightly demented person has been suing him for a decade, charging
that he stole his "Outline of History" from an unpublished manuscript
of his. Wells has had all the bills to pay, to say nothing of the
annoyance.
Wells and Arthur Machen were both asked to contribute to an abortive
magazine published in the '90s, and in one of the few issues appeared
Wells' "The Cone"--Machen's didn't get in because the magazine expired.
Wells' "The Time Machine," and Machen's effective horror story, "The
Three Imposters" were both quite in the limelight at the time. The
short lived magazines were somewhat of a forerunner of the modern
weird magazines. Machen was the subject of many amusing attacks, more
fully reported in his autobiographical "Far Off Things" and "Things
Near and Far," even being accused of being deliberately unpleasant by
some prudish ladies' magazine for his "Great God Pan."
The three H. G. Wells stories featured in Weird Tales during 1925 and
1926 were reprints, though not mentioned as such when published. They
were written about a quarter of a century before.
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