These days, zombies are everywhere: from television series, to movies, to books, even to television commercials. If you were to ask people how this craze got started, most would point back to the classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. A few of those people, with more knowledge of the history of horror fiction, would acknowledge the late Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel I Am Legend, in which a single human tries to survive in a world filled with vampires.
If one broadens the definition of the “living dead,” however, the idea of a plague of zombies can be traced back much further, to the writing of none other than science fiction master H.G. Wells and his 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come!
In the later years of his life, H.G. Wells had strong socialist political views and believed that humanity’s inevitable utopian future was to form a world government; much of his later writings reflected this belief. I have blogged previously about Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free, in which the world is forced into peace by the development of nuclear weapons. In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells takes an even more grandiose view, and predicts the future of the world from 1933 (the present, to Wells) to 2106.
Skulls in the Stars 