H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells an English writer (1866-1946), often called the father of science fiction, whose novels of time travel, invasion and biological transformation helped create a new literary genre. He was also a prolific social thinker and popular historian whose ideas about progress, education and world order reached a vast readership.

Life and Formation

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866, the son of a shopkeeper and a former domestic servant. He was apprenticed to a draper and then worked as a pupil teacher before winning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.

The training in science he received there gave his imagination its distinctive bent toward biology, evolution and the laws of nature. He taught school for a time and began writing articles and fiction. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel, and in 1895, the year of his first scientific romance, he married Amy Catherine Robbins, known as Jane, after his first marriage ended.

He came to know many of the literary and intellectual figures of his day, joined the socialist Fabian Society for a period, and argued with its leading members, including George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb. His restless curiosity led him from fiction into history, politics, education and prophecy, and he wrote in almost every form.

Scientific Romances

His early novels invented many of the conventions of science fiction. The Time Machine, published in 1895, sends an inventor far into the future and finds there a humanity divided into two species, a meditation on class and evolution that ends in a vision of the earth's death. It remains one of the founding texts of the genre.

The Island of Doctor Moreau of 1896 concerns a scientist who transforms animals into humanlike beings, and it raises disturbing questions about cruelty, experiment and the boundary between the human and the animal. The Invisible Man of 1897 follows a researcher whose discovery isolates and destroys him, and it uses its fantastic premise to examine vanity and revenge.

The War of the Worlds of 1898 describes the invasion of England by Martians and became one of the most influential invasion narratives ever written, later adapted by radio and film. The First Men in the Moon and When the Sleeper Wakes extended his range to lunar voyage and to a dystopian future of mechanised tyranny.

Social Novels and Nonfiction

Wells soon turned from scientific romance to realistic fiction about ordinary lives and social change. Kipps and The History of Mr Polly follow modest clerks and shopkeepers through comedy and liberation, while Tono-Bungay of 1909 uses a patent medicine empire to survey English society and its commerce with a critical eye.

He wrote The Outline of History, published in 1920, a vast survey of world history that sold enormously and shaped the historical understanding of a whole generation of general readers. The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind and other works advanced his scheme for a planned world society and for the scientific organisation of human affairs.

His novels of ideas, including The Shape of Things to Come, imagined the future as a contest between catastrophe and rational reconstruction. He advocated a world state, universal education and the peaceful use of technology, and he warned repeatedly that without planning and international cooperation, human civilisation would destroy itself.

Ideas and Public Influence

Wells believed that human beings could master their own destiny through knowledge and cooperation. He saw evolution not as a finished process but as an open possibility, and he argued that society could be deliberately improved by science, education and design. This optimism was tempered by a fear of war and of the irrational forces he saw in modern politics.

He was a socialist of an independent kind. He criticised the Fabians for their gradualism and their attachment to the existing order, and he looked instead to a class of trained experts, a samurai of science and administration, who would guide the reconstruction of the world. Some readers found his vision generous, others found it technocratic.

Late in life, after two world wars and the rise of the atomic bomb, his confidence gave way to a sombre view. His final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in 1945, is a bleak testament to a writer who had spent a lifetime preaching human mastery and ended by doubting whether humanity would survive its own powers.

Influence and Legacy

Wells changed the literature of the future. Along with Jules Verne, and in a more speculative and social spirit, he established the scientific romance as a serious form, and writers of science fiction from the twentieth century onward have drawn on his inventions, from time travel and alien invasion to genetic engineering and the post-human.

Beyond fiction he was one of the most widely read public intellectuals of his age. His outline of history and his commentaries on war and peace reached millions, and his idea of a world state anticipated later movements for international government. He corresponded and argued with statesmen and with writers, among them Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Henry James.

He died in London on 13 August 1946. His reputation as a novelist has fluctuated, but his place in the history of ideas and of science fiction is secure. His early romances remain widely read, and his name is attached to one of the great imaginative projects of modern literature, the effort to think seriously about what the future might hold.

See also

• Science fiction
• The Time Machine
• The War of the Worlds
• World state