H.G. Wells was of course very interested in the future. There is The Time Machine, which takes its inventor and operator much too far into the future, to find that the inequalities of the era in which the story was written have increased exponentially, with the degraded working classes having dysgenically morphed into apish and cannibalistic underworld-dwellers and the upper classes into small and feckless loafers, cared for by the others as farmers care for livestock, and for the same purposes. It was a powerful vision, no less powerful for being bizarrely unlikely (leaving aside the time-travel premise to begin with).
Oddly enough, in an era when projectors of utopias began to see the future as the right location for their new societies rather than hidden valleys or islands, Wells set his own (A Modern Utopia, 1905) on an alternative earth, set out in a striking metafictional form, with Wells as narrator describing to a London audience of his own time his admittedly imaginary adventures in a wonderful contra-earth. When Wells considered the near-term future, though, his vision was ambiguous at best, and dystopian at its core.
