<P> Rex Warner's dystopian novel The Aerodrome (1941) is partly a fictional critique of The Shape of Things to Come, with Wells' "Air Police" transformed into the fascistic "Airmen". </P> <P> Wells depicted the European social scientist Gustave De Windt sitting down at the British Museum Library and setting out the precise blueprint for a transformation of the world which he would not live to see . This, in Theodore Wein's opinion, may have inspired Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov's well - known character . Wein noted: "Wells' De Windt, conducting his library research in London, capital of the declining British Empire, realized that the world was about to fall apart, and set out a detailed blueprint of how to put it together again . The bulk of Wells's book details how De Windt's disciples, the Modern State Society, set about implementing De Windt's vision . Asimov's Seldon conducted his library research in the Imperial Library of Trantor, capital of the declining Galactic Empire . He realized that the Galaxy was about to fall apart, and set out a detailed blueprint of how to put it together again . The bulk of Asimov's Foundation Series details how Seldon's disciples, the First Foundation and the Second one, set about implementing Seldon's vision .". </P> <P> Wein also points to Wells' "Encyclopaedic organization which centres upon Barcelona, with its seventeen million active workers" which is tasked with creating "the Fundamental Knowledge System which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order and renders available everything that is known" as a possible inspiration for Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica, whose compilation was the original task of the First Foundation and quotes from which are sprinkled throughout the Foundation Series . </P> <P> The British Wells had the planes of the emerging World State overfly Washington, D.C. and undermine the authority of the President of the United States . A decade later, the American Robert Heinlein wrote "Solution Unsatisfactory" in which planes of the International Patrol do the same . Later, Heinlein upgraded the International Patrol into an Interplanetary Patrol, a self - appointed elite of highly motivated and rather puritanical spacemen reminiscent of those enforcing Wells' "Dictatorship of the Air". </P>

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