Chapter 4 - H. G. Wells and the evolution of the mad scientist

Summary

In 1893, H. G. Wells’s article “The Man of the Year Million” dramatically predicted the distant evolutionary future of mankind:

The descendants of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shrivelled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.

The editors at Punch evidently found this prediction hilarious, publishing a poem and accompanying sketch ridiculing Wells’s lopsided future humans (see Figure 5). But not everyone was laughing.