Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st US, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers with gilt lettering, 454 pages. "This novel forecasts the advent of the world state. It includes Wells's most thorough indictment of the phenomenon of fascism." A strange disturbing book, published on the eve of WWII. It is in part an analysis of fascism and in part a utopian novel. The book is a biography of a character Rudolf 'Rud' Whitlow, who is born with such an aggressive temperament that he is referred to by his nurse as the 'Holy Terror' and the infant become the despair of his parents. Rud eventually gets involved in socialist activism and a group plotting world revolution.