A short life of the author
H. G. Wells was the father of modern science fiction and one of the most important English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a man who, in a burst of creative energy between 1895 and 1901, wrote a series of “scientific romances” that invented virtually every major theme and trope of the genre: time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, genetic engineering, space travel, and the end of civilisation. No single writer has had a comparable influence on the science fiction that followed. Every alien invasion story descends from The War of the Worlds. Every time-travel narrative descends from The Time Machine. Every mad-scientist tale descends from The Island of Doctor Moreau.
From Bromley to the World
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, the youngest son of a shopkeeper and a former domestic servant. His childhood was one of precarious lower-middle-class gentility: his father’s crockery shop failed, his mother returned to domestic service as a housekeeper at Uppark, a country house in Sussex, and the young Wells was apprenticed to a draper — a fate he regarded with horror and which he escaped through a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley.
Huxley’s teaching — evolutionary theory, the pitiless logic of natural selection, the insignificance of humanity in geological time — was the intellectual foundation of everything Wells wrote. The scientific romances are Darwinian parables: The Time Machine shows humanity evolving into two degenerate species; The War of the Worlds presents an alien invasion as a colonial encounter in which the technologically superior civilisation is, for once, not ours; The Island of Doctor Moreau explores the boundary between human and animal.
The Scientific Romances
The Time Machine (1895), Wells’s first novel, is a masterpiece of compressed storytelling. A Victorian scientist travels to the year 802,701 and discovers that humanity has split into two species: the childlike, beautiful, helpless Eloi who live on the surface, and the subterranean Morlocks who tend the machinery and feed on the Eloi. The novel is a parable of class warfare, a meditation on entropy and the death of the sun, and a brilliantly sustained piece of speculative imagination.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is the darkest of the romances — a shipwrecked man discovers an island where a vivisectionist has surgically transformed animals into quasi-human “Beast Folk” who maintain a fragile, chanted “Law” against reversion. The Invisible Man (1897) is both a thriller and a study of the moral consequences of power without accountability. The War of the Worlds (1898) — in which Martians invade southern England, destroy the British military, and are defeated only by terrestrial bacteria — is the prototype of every alien invasion narrative and one of the most gripping adventure stories in English.
The First Men in the Moon (1901) sends two Englishmen to the moon, where they discover an insect-like civilisation living beneath the surface. It is the last of the great romances and one of the most inventive.
The Novels of Social Comedy
Wells was not only a science fiction writer. Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) are comic novels about lower-middle-class Englishmen struggling against the restrictions of their class — autobiographical in inspiration and Dickensian in their sympathy and their humour. Tono-Bungay (1909) is his most ambitious realistic novel, a panoramic satire of Edwardian England built around a fraudulent patent medicine empire.
Ann Veronica (1909), about a young woman who rebels against her father and pursues a sexual relationship outside marriage, was scandalous in its day and is now read as an early feminist novel.
The Prophet
In his later career, Wells turned increasingly to prophecy and propaganda. The Outline of History (1920), a massive popular history of civilisation from the Stone Age to the League of Nations, sold over two million copies and was the most successful nonfiction book of the 1920s. The Shape of Things to Come (1933) predicted aerial warfare, the collapse of civilisation, and the eventual creation of a technocratic world state.
Wells met with Stalin, Roosevelt, and Lenin. He advocated for world government, universal education, and the abolition of national sovereignty. His final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), was a despairing meditation on the extinction of humanity — a dark coda from a man who had spent his life arguing for human progress.
Collecting Wells
The Time Machine (Heinemann, 1895) in first edition is the key collecting target — Wells’s first novel and the founding text of modern science fiction. The War of the Worlds (Heinemann, 1898) is equally important. The Heinemann first editions of the scientific romances (1895–1901) are the most sought-after, particularly in the original cloth bindings. The Atlantic Edition (Scribner’s / T. Fisher Unwin, 28 volumes, 1924–1927), with Wells’s own prefaces, is the standard collected edition.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Modern Utopia Wells's most sophisticated political vision — a philosophical novel imagining a rationally governed world state, combining utopian speculation with self-aware literary experimentation, foundational to twentieth-century political thought. | 1905 | Chapman & Hall | English |
| Ann Veronica Wells's feminist novel — a young woman defies her father, goes to London, joins the suffragette movement, and pursues a married man, in a work that scandalized Edwardian England and remains a vivid document of women's fight for independence. | 1909 | T. Fisher Unwin | English |
| Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul Wells's finest comic novel — the story of a draper's apprentice who inherits a fortune and is destroyed by the class system he tries to enter, a sharply observed social comedy that Dickens might have envied. | 1905 | Macmillan | English |
| Mr Britling Sees It Through Wells's World War I masterpiece — the story of an English intellectual confronting the reality of the war through the loss of his son, the most popular novel in England during 1916–1917 and a passionate cry against the senselessness of the conflict. | 1916 | Cassell | English |
| Star Begotten Wells's late return to science fiction — the idea that Martians are subtly altering human genetics through cosmic rays to produce a new, superior humanity, a meditation on paranoia, progress, and whether the human race deserves to survive. | 1937 | Chatto & Windus | English |
| The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Wells's definitive short story collection — thirty-three tales ranging from cosmic horror to social comedy, including some of the finest science fiction short stories ever written, showcasing the range and invention that made Wells the most versatile writer of his generation. | 1911 | Thomas Nelson | English |
| The Croquet Player Wells's compact parable of rising fascism — a seemingly civilized croquet player encounters evidence that primordial violence is seeping back into modern life, in a late novella that reads as a premonition of the coming world war. | 1936 | Chatto & Windus | English |
| The First Men in the Moon Wells's lunar adventure — two Englishmen reach the Moon using an anti-gravity substance and discover an underground insect civilization, in a novel that combines satirical commentary on colonialism with genuine imaginative wonder. | 1901 | George Newnes | English |
| The Food of the Gods Wells's satire of progress and fear — two scientists create a substance that causes gigantic growth, unleashing enormous children on an England terrified of change, in an allegory about humanity's resistance to its own advancement. | 1904 | Macmillan | English |
| The History of Mr Polly Wells's most purely joyful novel — the story of a miserable shopkeeper who fakes his own death and escapes to an idyllic life as a handyman at a country inn, a comic masterpiece about the possibility of reinvention. | 1910 | Thomas Nelson | English |
| The Invisible Man Wells's scientific horror novel — a physicist renders himself invisible and descends into paranoia, violence, and ultimately a 'Reign of Terror,' in a work that explores what happens when power removes all social accountability. | 1897 | C. Arthur Pearson | English |
| The Island of Doctor Moreau Wells's most horrific scientific romance — a castaway discovers an island where a vivisectionist transforms animals into human-like creatures through surgery, raising questions about pain, creation, and the nature of humanity itself. | 1896 | William Heinemann | English |
| The Outline of History Wells's monumental attempt to write the entire history of the human race in a single narrative — from the formation of the Earth to the aftermath of World War I — which became the best-selling nonfiction work of the 1920s and changed how popular history was written. | 1920 | George Newnes | English |
| The Science of Life Wells's massive biology encyclopedia — co-written with Julian Huxley and his own son G.P. Wells, a comprehensive survey of all biological knowledge that did for the life sciences what The Outline of History had done for human history. | 1930 | Amalgamated Press | English |
| The Shape of Things to Come Wells's sprawling future history — a speculative chronicle of the next two centuries, predicting a devastating world war, the collapse of nation-states, and the eventual emergence of a technocratic world government, adapted into the landmark 1936 film Things to Come. | 1933 | Hutchinson | English |
| The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents Wells's first short story collection — fifteen tales of scientific wonder, social satire, and quiet horror, published in the same miraculous year as The Time Machine and establishing Wells as a master of the short form. | 1895 | Methuen | English |
| The Time Machine Wells's debut novel and the work that invented time travel as a science fiction concept — the Time Traveller journeys to 802,701 AD and discovers humanity divided into beautiful, helpless Eloi and subterranean, predatory Morlocks. | 1895 | William Heinemann | English |
| The War in the Air Wells's prophetic war novel — a working-class Englishman is swept up in a German aerial invasion of America, in a work that predicted the strategic bombing of cities a decade before World War I and three decades before World War II. | 1908 | George Bell and Sons | English |
| The War of the Worlds Wells's alien invasion masterpiece — Martians land in Surrey and systematically destroy Victorian civilization with heat rays and poison gas, in a novel that invented the alien invasion genre and remains unsurpassed within it. | 1898 | William Heinemann | English |
| The Wonderful Visit Wells's satirical fantasy — an angel falls to Earth in rural England and is systematically destroyed by the pettiness, cruelty, and conventionality of English village life, a parable about beauty's incompatibility with respectability. | 1895 | J.M. Dent | English |
| The World Set Free Wells's most astonishing prophecy — a novel published months before World War I that predicted atomic energy, atomic bombs, and the destruction of major cities by nuclear weapons, inspiring Leo Szilard to conceive the nuclear chain reaction. | 1914 | Macmillan | English |
| Things to Come Wells's film treatment published as a book — the screenplay and novelization of the landmark Alexander Korda science fiction film, adapted from The Shape of Things to Come, presenting Wells's vision of war, collapse, and the rebuilding of civilization through science. | 1935 | Cresset Press | English |
| Tono-Bungay Wells's most ambitious social novel — a panoramic account of Edwardian England told through the rise and fall of a quack patent medicine empire, blending autobiography, social criticism, and wild narrative energy into his closest approach to the great English novel. | 1909 | Macmillan | English |