1866: Sci-fi legend and determined futurist Herbert George Wells is born into the lower middle class in England. The prolific author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and many more immeasurably influential works will eventually produce an essential literary legacy that has since transcended time altogether – while terrorizing minds with debilitating narratives of alien invasions, human-animal hybrids, nuclear apocalypse and worse.
Visionary H.G. Wells was raised by his Protestant mother Sarah Neal, who worked as a domestic servant, and his free-thinking shopkeeper father Joseph Wells, who actually made most of his money as a semi-pro cricketer. The family's delicate financial situation was upended when Joseph fractured his thigh in 1877, and his sons were booted out of private schools and forced into apprenticeships.
The social demotion depressed Wells, who had broken his own leg in 1874 and spent the downtime getting lost in books procured for him at the local library. Somehow, the lover of literature's endless scope couldn't imagine himself as a draper or a chemist. That class stratification went on to influence the social novels of his middle period, like Kipps – about a dead-end draper who suddenly comes into money.
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Sci-Fi Visionary H.G. Wells Travels Through Time
The literary wish-fantasies of the bookworm Wells were destined for more galactic accomplishments. And once he finally secured a position as a student teacher after begging for release from his apprenticeships, his imaginative career took off.
He won a scholarship to London's awesomely named Normal School of Science, which now has the more boring name Royal College of Science. He studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed "Darwin's Bulldog" for his evolutionary evangelism. (His grandson Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 sci-fi classic Brave New World would compete with Wells' own predictive 1910 novel When the Sleeper Wakes for generations of readers.) By 1890, Wells finally had his B.S. in Zoology and a brilliant future as a cultural and creative prophet ahead of him.
Wells hit the literary mother lode on his first try in 1895, banging out the 32,000-word novella The Time Machine and forever popularizing the concept of time travel in popular culture and science. In fact, Wells himself became synonymous with it, skipping across centuries as a character in films like Time After Time and television shows like Lois & Clark and Dr. Who.
By the time the turn of the century arrived, Wells had eternally sequenced the cultural genes of mad scientists (The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man), dystopian social engineering (When the Sleeper Wakes), and alien invasion and total war (The War of the Worlds), all before turning 35.
Once the 20th century detonated, Wells' ceaselessly hungry mind churned out novels and treatises on political unity (A Modern Utopia), suffragettes (Ann Veronica), geopolitical conflict (The War in the Air), technology (The World Set Free) and even corny romance (The Passionate Friends). By a rough count, he averaged well over two books a year, some fiction and some nonfiction.
He was also highly productive in his love life, having multiple affairs with women like birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and writers Rebecca West, Elizabeth Van Arnim, Amber Reeves and others, some of whom bore him heirs to the sci-fi throne.
Wells also bore strange accidental fruit that changed the world in other ways. Robert H. Goddard, who invented the first fuel rocket and thereby the Space Age, was deeply inspired after reading The War of the Worlds at 16. Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction after reading about the then-fictional atomic bombs theorized in Wells' The World Set Free.
Wells' conception of a polymath utopia that renders Christianity obsolete in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come – which also predicted the outbreak of World War II, give or take a year – so pissed off crusty moralist C.S. Lewis that he caricatured Wells in his less-interesting sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength. But Lewis never had a chance: Along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Wells is now widely regarded as a father of science fiction, while Lewis is still lost in a wardrobe with lions and witches.
There is simply not enough time (that word again) – nor words, really – to fully explicate Wells' tectonic impact on culture, entertainment and science as we know it, and will know it. A year after the end of World War II, Wells died of unknown causes in the very London that helped him make his name.
His suggested epitaph in The War in the Air read: "I told you so. You damned fools." He was right.
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Photo: via Wikipedia
