Growing up

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866, the youngest son of lower-middle-class parents. "His father, Joseph Wells, was a celebrated cricket player turned failed shopkeeper," At one time he had also been a gardener--a "service" occupation--in an upper-class household. "All his days," Wells wrote in his Experiment in Autobiography, "my father was a happy and appreciative man with a singular distaste for contention or holding his own in the world. He liked to do clever things with his brain and hands and body, but he was bored beyond endurance by the idea of a continual struggle for existence."

Wells's "rather domineering mother, Sarah Neal Wells, was a housekeeper and lady's maid whose fondest dream was that young 'Bertie' and his two older brothers should become respectable tradesmen in service to the upper classes." According to Wells's statements, she urged him to become a draper's apprentice fourteen, where he was "given so bad a time as to stiffen my naturally indolent, rather slovenly, and far too genial nature into a grim rebellion against the world." Then she attempted to apprentice him to a chemist. This also failed. Finally, "when he was nearly seventeen, Wells finally convinced his mother that apprentice positions ... had left him desperately unhappy. She allowed him to enroll as a pupil-tutor at the Midhurst Grammar School, and--two years later--to accept a scholarship at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington."

At 17 - Normal School of Science

At 21 - His Health

The attending physician, however, had a different idea. He "was a brilliant young heretic in the medical world of those days ... and he rather dashed my pose as a consumptive and encouraged my secret hope of life by refusing to recognize me as a tuberculous case." "Summer passed into spring and I grew stronger every day," Wells continued. "One bright afternoon I went out by myself to a little patch of surviving woodland amidst the industrialized country, called 'Trury Woods.' There had been a great outbreak of wild hyacinths that year and I lay down among them to think. It was one of those sun drenched afternoons that are turgid with vitality. Those hyacinths and their upright multitude were braver than an army with banners and more inspiring than trumpets. 'I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year,' I said, 'and I have died enough.'"

At 25 - He Marries and again at 29 - He marries

Wells suffered another severe hemorrhage in 1893. "No more teaching for me for ever," he wrote in a letter cited in H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait. As he slowly recovered, he struck up a close friendship with one of his biology students, Amy Catherine Robbins, "the embodiment of all the understanding and quality I desired in life," he recalled in H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait. "We talked--over our frogs and rabbits.... Our friendship grew swiftly beyond the bounds of friendship and I was amazed to find that she could care for me as much as I did for her." Wells obtained a divorce from his first wife in 1895 and married Robbins the same year.

Commencing a Writing Career

Critics generally agree that Wells wrote his best science fiction before 1901. By that time, he had earned enough from sales of his writing to build his own home, Spade House, near the English coast in the county of Kent. By that time, he was firmly established as a professional writer. "Some of his works had already been translated into French and Italian."

H G Wells was responsible for an entirely new genre of writing. It was his bold, daring and hugely innovative books that first introduced readers to the concepts of time travel, invisibility, genetic experimentation and interstellar invasion -- ideas that have gone on to inspire future generations and given rise to the entire science fiction industry.

Wells wrote over 100 books, about half of them fiction. We will list only the most famous science fiction titles below.

OK - You all know the plot, right. When the Time Traveller finds the Eloi and the Morlocks, "they are a parable of the social consequences of science." Although mankind has been able to create a fully leisured class, it has done so at the cost of splitting itself into two distinct species and has also lost its competitive spirit. The critics stated--"the workers thrust underground and deprived of light and the natural world (The Morlocks), the rich(The Eloi) living idly and softly on the surface, on the profits of the workers' labor." By making the Morlocks cannibals, they concluded, "Wells is saying ... that those to whom evil is done do evil in return, that exploitation makes monsters, that cruelty is an inevitable product of a cruel system, and inhuman conduct is an inevitable product of inhumanity."

A shipwreck in the South Seas brings a doctor to an island paradise. Far from seeing this as the end of his life, Dr Moreau seizes the opportunity to play God and infiltrate a reign of terror in this new kingdom. Endless cruel and perverse experiments ensue and see a series of new creations -- the 'Beast People' -- all of which must bow before the deified doctor.

In The Island of Dr. Moreau a shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick, stranded on a Pacific island lorded over by the notorious Dr. Moreau, confronts dark secrets, strange creatures, and a reason to run for his life.

Ranked among the classic novels of the English language and the inspiration for several unforgettable movies, this riveting tale was intended to be a commentary on evolution, divine creation, and the tension between human nature and culture. Modern readers familiar with genetic engineering will marvel at Wells’s prediction of the ethical issues raised by producing smarter human beings or bringing back extinct species.

These levels of interpretation add a richness to Prendick’s adventures on Dr. Moreau’s island of lost souls without distracting from what is still a rip-roaring good read.

It began with a quiet country inn--and a mysterious stranger, his features masked by gloves, dark glasses, and bandages that completely covered his head. Then came weird noises, the disembodied ravings, the phantom robberies, the haunted furniture...The violence...The rampages...The killing.

An obscure scientist named Griffin had found a way to turn skin, flesh, blood and bones invisible--and tried the formula on himself. He could go anywhere; spy; steal; menace anyone. The Invisible Man had only two problems.

He couldn't turn visible again. And he had gone quite murderously insane.

The story is grim, owing something to the tradition of the Gothic novel, but it is replete with adventure as Griffin turns against everyone He is both a tragic and an ironic figure, a rational thinker--a scientist--who cannot escape the consequences of his own irrationality. The movie (right) is considered one of the great Universal horror films of the 1930s, and it spawned a number of sequels, plus many spinoffs using the idea of an "invisible man" that were largely unrelated to Wells' original story.

"The most celebrated of all Wells's books is The War of the Worlds."

Over a ten day period in the late nineteenth century, astronomers observe a series of large explosions on the surface of the planet Mars. Within a few days, huge cylinders begin dropping on sites in southern England near London. From the cylinders emerge the Martians: giant octopus-like creatures possessed of greatly superior technology. "Men, curious and friendly at first," wrote Williamson, "are stung into armed resistance by the unprovoked Martian attacks, and finally driven out of London in dazed and helpless panic. Although two or three Martians are killed, their superior weapons easily crush the best human defenses. Their victory seems secure--when suddenly they die, rotted by the micro-organisms of decay."

The narrative is so appallingly convincing that Orson Welles was able to create an actual panic in New Jersey on an October evening of 1938, with a radio version of it.

Wells repeatedly compares the Martians' brutal treatment of their victims to civilized man's treatment of animals and supposedly inferior races," declared Draper.

Meeting a competing species of life against which they have no biological defenses, the Martians are eliminated. Ironically, their lack of defenses is probably the result of their own past progress.

This is not his best work, but it is still fun to read. When the young and penniless Mr. Bedford meets an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor, who doesn't realize the importance of his own inventions, it seems most fortuitous. Of greatest interest is Cavor's realization that he can create a substance that shields against gravity. Together, they come to the conclusion that, with this new substance, they can make ships to take them to other planets within the solar system. And so, with Cavor dreaming of scientific breakthroughs and Bedford dreaming of wealth, the two build such a ship, and set off for the Moon.

Arriving at the Moon, the two quickly realize what a strange and amazing place it is. During the lunar day, there is a breathable atmosphere on the surface of the Moon, and their investigations soon demonstrate that the Moon is inhabited by a race of intelligent beings. An insectoid race, the Selenites (or "Moonies" as Cavor whimsically dubs them) have a highly-organized caste system much like terrestrial ants. Can our heroes escape from the Selenites and return to Earth? And, what are the long-term affects of this new meeting of societies going to be?

For me the most memorable part of the novel was the description of the aliens. As often, Wells has thoughts on our society which reflect in the work. The aliens are arranged in a strictly pragmatic system of breeding and the allocation of tasks where beings are educated with repect to what society needs them to do to the exclusion of everything else. Like an ant colony. And the character's account to their leader of life in human society is priceless - as if often takes the act of seeing our world through alien eyes to see how crazy some if it is.

Two scientists discover the recipe for a growth agent which they see as a great benefit for the future life of man on earth. It culd creat unlimited food sources. They set out to experiment by purchasing a small farm and feeding the new food, spontaneously dubbed Food of the Gods, to a number of hens. Unfortunately, the food finds it way to a number of other locations. Huge wasps appear to terrify the local community; the hens eventually escape and run amuck, gigantic creeping plants begin to take over various areas of land, and then gigantic rats torment the local population. The farm and its creations are forcibly cleaned up, but the story by no means ends there.

The two scientists continue work on the food with the intent of controlling its use, but a neighboring doctor forces his way into their lives and launches a public campaign for their product. This, plus the fact that the food continues to find its way to different places (with the resulting consequences of huge new pests and pestilences) contributes to a growing public reaction against the food.

The sons of the scientists are given the food and eventually grow in excess of forty feet tall. The giants look at the population and see homelessness, perpetual drunkenness, poverty, and other social ills, and they want to help; sadly, every attempt to serve is met with more consternation and increased restraints on their movements. Eventually, the anti-giants league takes power and sets out to rid their world of the giants through either exile or war.