<<<  Herbert George Wells  ^[1] 

(1866 - 1946)

Wells has long been considered the "father of science fiction." Affectionately nicknamed Bertie, he was born into a lower-middle class family, his mother a lady's maid and his father a sometime shopkeeper. Wells left school and became a draper's^[2] apprentice at fourteen. Unhappy with such a life, a fortunate scholarship to the Normal School of Science^[3] in London allowed him to study with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley^[4]. In 1893 Wells was regularly selling short stories and articles as well as working as a schoolteacher. The Time Machine was published in 1895 (he was 29) and was an immediate success! Greg Bear, prize-winning novelist, notes "In an age intrigued by all the possibilities of science and mathematics, Wells's first work of fiction was like a brisk slap in the face. 'The future will be marvelous,' the young Wells told his audience, 'and also tragic, even horrible."^[5]

Wells followed with other stories romanticizing science: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and The War in the Air (1908). Bear describes him as "the twentieth-century prototype of the angry young man, brilliant and full of contradictions . . . [he] promoted his changeable brand of socialism yet toyed with (early on, at least) a belief in God, called for equality of the sexes yet was a flagrant womanizer, decried class distinctions yet sought the approval of the rich, the powerful, and the famous - and then just as quickly, denounced them!"^[6]

Unfortunately, Wells had believed World War I to be "the war that will end war" and became disillusioned afterwards with the onslaught of World War II and intensified his efforts to educate mankind with the bestselling Outline of History (1920) and other later Utopian works. Wells had been a scientific prophet and stern critic of political and technological progress; World War I had confirmed the very violence he predicted "as bodies stacked in uncounted piles - much of a generation wasted."^[7] That promise of technology and progress had turned toward warfare. Bear further points out that "Wells lived long enough to see another of his predictions - the atomic bomb - undergo a horrible birth in the skies over Japan."^[8] Toward the end of his life Wells, returning to the pessimism of his youth, bitterly reflected on a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, saying "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me."^[9] 

Yet, one must remember that hope can always be found, humanity has persisted and even Wells can be viewed to relent at the end of the epilogue to the Time Machine, not through the voice of our time traveler, but through our anonymous narrator: "And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man."^[10] So does humankind still cling to such a fragile, slight thing in its most frail and dejected form - brittle brown flowers - overwhelmed by the time and violence it survived. It is nevertheless hope.

Continue to the next page: The Time Machine