H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

Herbert George "H.G." Wells, son of Joseph Wells and Sarah Neal, was born in Bromley, Kent, England on 21 Sep 1866. In 1891 he married his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells with whom he separated. In 1894 he married Amy Catherine "Jane" Robbins with whom he had sons George Philip and Frank Richard. Other children included: Anna-Jane (with the writer Amber Reeves); Anthony West (with the novelist/feminist Rebecca West). Wells died in London, England on 13 Aug 1946. 

Wells was writing about travelling to the moon, alien invasions, alien civilizations, time travel, mad science experiments, invisibility and cities of the future decades before they became the normal staples of science fiction.

The popularity of "The Time Machine" led to Wells writing more “scientific romances”, an early term. Stories such as "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896), "The Invisible Man" (1897), "The War of the Worlds" (1898), "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899), "The First Men in the Moon" (1901) and In the "Days of the Comet" (1906).

Click here to visit H.G. Wells On the Screen ...

One of the great visionaries of his time, Wells also contemplated the ideas of nature and nurture and dreamed of a utopian society ... a United States of Earth or ‘World State’ with a single common political authority for all mankind. He wrote a number of Utopian novels. The first of these was "A Modern Utopia" (1905), which shows a worldwide utopia with "no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all; two travelers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realize a better way of living.

But not all of his scientific romances ended in a happy Utopia: In "When the Sleeper Wakes" (rewritten as "The Sleeper Awakes", 1910), classes in a future society have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. "The Island of Doctor Moreau" is even darker: The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilized beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures.

Radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in "Tono-Bungay." and a much larger role in "The World Set Free" (1914), a book that contains what is surely his biggest prophetic work. Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge.

1936 Poster

Wells' novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosive—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century", he wrote, "than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands". In 1932 Leó Szilárde, a physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, read "The World Set Free" and noted it made a great impression on him.

In "The Shape of Things to Come" (1933), which he later adapted for the 1936 Alexander Korda film "Things to Come", Wells depicted a World War with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs. The world war he feared would begin January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true just four months early, when WWII broke out in September 1939.