British · b. 1866
Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society
H.G. Wells was a British author whose early scientific romances — The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau — essentially invented the genre of science fiction.
H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895 and in the following decade produced the foundational texts of science fiction: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901). No other author has contributed so many generative ideas to a genre in so short a period. The Martian invasion, the time traveler, the vivisectionist playing God, the invisible man — these are images so completely absorbed by popular culture that many readers encounter them without knowing their origin.
The Time Machine is simultaneously an adventure story and a Marxist allegory: the distant future reveals the working class and leisure class evolved into two separate species. The War of the Worlds invented the alien invasion narrative and, through the famous 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation, produced a cultural hysteria whose reputation has outlasted its documented reality. The Island of Doctor Moreau is the most disturbing of the early novels, its questions about the boundaries between human and animal as uncomfortable now as when written.
Wells was also a socialist polemicist and social forecaster whose non-fiction was widely read in his lifetime. His novels of ordinary social life — Kipps, The History of Mr Polly, Tono-Bungay — have their admirers. He died in 1946, two years after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, vindicating some of his bleakest technological predictions. The early scientific romances remain alive in ways that few nineteenth-century popular fictions are.
by H.G. Wells
Cylinders from Mars crash into the English countryside and open to reveal tentacled Martians who begin methodically annihilating human civilization with heat-rays and tripod war machines. Wells's 1898 novel invented the alien invasion genre and used it to turn the logic of British imperial power inside out, placing England in the position of the colonised.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by H.G. Wells
An unnamed Victorian inventor builds a machine that carries him to the year 802,701, where he discovers humanity has diverged into two degenerate species: the frail, childlike Eloi who live in crumbling palaces, and the subterranean Morlocks who tend the machines below ground. Wells's slim, ferocious novella invented time travel as a literary device and deployed it as a savage critique of Victorian class divisions.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by H.G. Wells
Griffin, a scientist who has discovered how to render himself invisible, arrives at a village inn in bandages and dark glasses — and rapidly descends from scientific triumph into paranoia and violence. Wells's dark comedy is simultaneously a thriller, a satire of scientific hubris, and a warning that power without accountability corrupts absolutely.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by H.G. Wells
Edward Prendick, shipwrecked and rescued, finds himself on a remote Pacific island where the reclusive Dr Moreau performs surgical experiments that transform animals into humanoid creatures who speak and live by a recited Law. Wells's most disturbing novel is a horror story, a philosophical fable about evolution and ethics, and one of science fiction's most sustained meditations on what separates humans from animals.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.