Herbert George “H.G.” Wells is best known for his classic novels of science fiction that helped define the genre. “The Time Machine” 1895, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”, “The Invisible Man”, “The First Men in the Moon” and “The War of the Worlds” are still quite readable today, and all have been source material for movies over the years. Wells anticipated a number of events and inventions that earned him the nickname “the man who invented the future”.
(I was an extra in the 2002 remake of The Time Machine — I’m in an early scene as a musician on a band stand in what is supposed to be Central Park in New York City in 1899.)
The following is interpolating heavily from the wikipedia article linked above. If you’d like to see a biography of Wells life, biography.com has a video here. It’s quite engaging.
Wells had a harsh early life, struggling to find a place in the world after several apprenticeships that did not work out, followed by efforts to find a career in education that took several attempts before he became established. He was trained in biology, chemistry, and eventually embraced a wide range of knowledge in a course of self-study.
He began writing to supplement his income with short stories, many of which may have escaped being attributed to him and are effectively lost, all though a few were collected and published together. His success at writing led him to write his first novel, “The Time Machine”, published in 1895. His science fiction stories are notable in that Wells tries to make them plausible and consistent, once you accept the key plot elements.
Wells had a number of interesting facets to his career; several marriages and numerous relationships, an interest in Darwin’s theories which influenced his stories, advocacy of socialism, history, and some talent as an artist. The Sleeper Awakes is an example of a dystopian future with severe inequality and class wafare. It uses a form of accidental suspended animation combined with compound interest as a gimmick to produce a vast concentration of wealth.
While Wells is known for his science fiction novels, he also ventured into fantasy, and non-fiction works such as his history of the world. The wikipedia entry on Wells has a plethora of links if you wish to follow up on more.
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The title of this diary came about because I was delving into Project Gutenberg and ran across The Door in the Wall and Other Stories by H.G. Wells. It’s available in both e-book formats and as audio versions. It’s a cross-section of Wells’s fiction works.
- The Door in the Wall is a fantasy, about a man haunted by a chance encounter as a child with an entry into a different realm. The ending will leave you wondering what if…
- The Star is a straightforward science fiction tale of cosmic billiards, extrapolating from what was known about the solar system at the time, and close encounters of the planetary kind, with some additional perspective.
- A Dream of Armageddon is the story of a man who finds himself dreaming the life of a man several centuries in the future, and what happens when that man makes a fatal decision for love.
- The Cone draws on Wells knowledge of heavy industry combined with a romantic triangle.
- A Moonlight Fable is a hard to describe story of the world of night and one young person’s perceptions of that world.
- The Diamond Maker is a case study of a man who has succeeded in realizing a dream — and then discovers that is only the beginning of the challenge facing him.
- The Lord of the Dynamos contains some disturbing racial stereotypes, but is also a morality tale of sorts about the collision of superstition/religion with technology.
- The Country of the Blind is one of Wells’s best known short stories. Take a lost valley high in the Andes, people who have been cut off from the rest of the world for generations — along with the power of sight — and then place a stranger in their midst who has fallen into the valley by chance…
If you’re only familiar with the science fiction novels of Wells, this is a good cross section of his short fiction. You can download it for free, or read it online at the Project Gutenberg website. There’s something unsettling about all of them. If you’re looking for simple entertainment this may not fit the bill,but all of them will lead you to consider wider vistas than your thoughts might normally encompass.