The archive of the Unamuno House-Museum has located an unpublished letter that the thinker sent to his children on March 2, 1936 from London, a document that definitively confirms that he attended the cinema with the British writer H. G. Wells.
In the letter, Unamuno confirms that he accepted the author’s invitation to dine and go together to the Leicester Square Theatre, where they watched the screening of the film Things to Come (La vida futura), a movie scripted by Wells himself and inspired by his work The Shape of Things to Come, according to a press release from the University of Salamanca.
A few hours before beginning the trip to Paris, Unamuno dedicates a few words to his children recounting the details of the experience: “Here we have fared very well. I will tell you everything. Wells took me to see his film. The weather, although cloudy, was excellent.”
The first evidence of this link between the two writers was identified in 2025 during the documentation process for the exhibition Que inventen ellos: Miguel de Unamuno y la ciencia, produced by the University of Salamanca’s Unit of Scientific Culture and Innovation in collaboration with the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.
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It was a handwritten invitation from H. G. Wells himself addressed to Unamuno during the philosopher’s stay in London on the occasion of his being named honorary doctor by the University of Oxford, in which he invited him to dine at his residence on Friday, February 28, 1936 and to the subsequent screening of Things to Come.
The identification of the new document, kept in the Unamuno House-Museum archive, constitutes a direct record that confirms a meeting of which, until now, only two indications were known: a poem with references related to the themes of Wells’s film and a chronicle by a correspondent for the newspaper El Sol. Perhaps from that encounter arose Unamuno’s interest in science fiction, which led him to write the tale “Mecanópolis: The City of Machines.”