H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells

	H.G Wells (1866-1946) is best known as the author of 'scientific romances' such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, but in a lifetime of eighty years he proved himself to be an accomplished and prolific author, journalist, sociologist, popular historian and social prophet. Born into a shop-keeping family, with a mother who worked as a housekeeper, Wells escaped from his first career as a draper's assistant to study Biology at the Normal School of Science in London. Working as a teacher of science his financial circumstances led him towards writing, achieving critical and financial success with The Time Machine in 1895, and followed up by the other popular scientific romances in the 1890s. In the early years of the twentieth century Wells turned towards more realistic forms of novel -writing, in works such as Kipps (1905), The History of Mr Polly (1910), Tono Bungay (1909) and Ann Veronica (1909). After the First World War Wells's power as a novelist deteriorated, but his reputation was restored with popular works of history such as The Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the World (1922), acquiring the status of popular educator and self-made intellectual. His final work, Mind At the End of Its Tether (1945) was a pessimistic and despairing work, worlds away from the humanitarian moral and political idealism which had marked his earlier works.
	Wells's scientific background, and particularly the influence of late nineteenth century writers like T.H. Huxley, explains a great deal of his commitment to the belief in the application of scientific and rational approaches to moral and social problems. His membership of the Fabian Society, an early Socialist group committed to social reform along rational and scientific principles, was but one instance of his persistent interest in social and political issues, issues which he explored in the scientific romances. Yet Wells was also aware of the shadow side to 'Science', that it could become a dangerous tool in the wrong hands, and used unwisely or ignorantly could become an instrument for social harm rather than social good. This is important to note, for Wells's writings, even at their most fantastic or romantic, always contain a social and political message. Wells, for example, (and perhaps this suggests how influential writers such as T.H. Huxley were on his thought), continually returned to explore issues of Evolutionary thought, and to explore the implications of post-Darwinian theories of Man and Society as they impinged upon issues of social reform, progress, and the ultimate moral perfectibility of Man.
	Like his French predecessor, Jules Verne, Wells's success as a popular scientific novelist derived from his ability to apply and popularize science and scientific ideas in new and imaginative ways. He was, for example, a scientific prophet, anticipating discoveries such as the tank, the atom bomb and aerial warfare, and many of his scientific writings anticipate future possibilities based on contemporary social and technological developments. Yet he goes further than Verne, in drawing out the social and political implications of such possibilities. As an early pioneer of 'Science fiction' he anticipates the treatment by later SF writers of key themes: time travel, alien invasion, biological experimentation and genetic engineering, visions of the future city, and the anti-utopian (="dystopian") vision of Brave New World and 1984. His skill as a 'scientific romancer', however, is to take a single premise and then to explore it with a spirit of rigorous realism, as Wells himself remarks in his 1933 'Preface' to the Scientific Romances:
	In all this type of story the living interest lies in their non-fantastic elements and not in the invention itself... The thing that makes such imaginations interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human... As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention. So soon as the hypothesis is launched the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired.
	We can see what Wells means here when thinking of the lack of scientific detail which is given in The Time Machine (how exactly does it work?) or, in The War of the Worlds, in the striking contrast between the fanciful story of the Martian invasion and their attack on prosaic suburban towns such as Weybridge or Leatherhead. For Wells scientific inventiveness is not an end in itself, but a means towards the type of social and psychological exploration described in the 'Preface'. How this works in two key works, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, is something which I would like to explore in more detail.

The Time Machine

The War of the Worlds

Further Information

The Time Machine

The War of the Worlds