Man Who Could Work Miracles and Things to Come

Man Who Could Work Miracles (without a The) is a film, ostensibly a comedy, that H.G. Wells (1866-1946) scripted late in life for London Film Productions. The present volume is a literary text of the scenario and dialogue published in advance of the movie's release in 1937. Wells himself says it is a companion piece to Things to Come, his deadly serious film done a year before. Both films were produced by Alexander Korda, who extended to Wells unprecedented control over them. The editor's introduction explains how two such radically different films are related and discusses the artistic quality of the text, Wells' overriding sense of cosmic vision, his views on sex and politics, and his uncommon estimate of the common man's incapacity for public affairs. The annotations for Wells' original text offer penetrating insights into Wellsian thought as expressed for half a century in a variety of genres, including scientific romances and nonfiction. The author, the world's foremost Wellsian scholar, here brings his unique power of analysis to bear on, in the opinion of many, the strangest work Wells ever wrote. The appendices include the 1898 short story version, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, three related cosmic-vision short stories by Wells, and an excerpt from a 1931 radio address by Wells not inaccurately retitled If I Were Dictator of the World. Things to Come is the 1936 release of London Films, produced from the 1935 film story by H.G. Wells, the text of the present work. The book includes more than 100 illustrations, most of them publicity stills that are all the more relevant because Wells, for a script writer, had unusual control over the actual film production. The images are very much a direct expression of his film story. Done at age 70, Things to Come reflects on a long literary career, in both fiction and nonfiction, often given to the fate of man and the prospect of a unified world state, a utopian future realized in the film by A.D. 2036. That is what is coming: the end of warfare between belligerent nation states. Now the new frontier of human conquest is space, begun at film's end with the first firing of a gigantic space gun.