Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS—novelist, social critic, and visionary futurist who became one of the most prolific and widely read writers of his generation—was born in the London suburb of Bromley, Kent, on September 21, 1866. He came from a lower-middle-class background and grew up in circumstances of genteel poverty that would not have seemed out of place in a novel by Dickens. His father was at various times a gardener, professional cricket player, and shopkeeper; his mother was a housekeeper and former lady’s maid. The youngster, nicknamed Bertie, became an avid reader at the age of seven while lying bedridden with a broken leg.

Although he left school to become a draper’s apprentice at fourteen, Wells later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. There he studied zoology under T. H. Huxley, a noted disciple of Darwin who instilled in Wells a belief in social as well as biological evolution. Wells’s first prophetic work, “A Tale of the Twentieth Century,” was published in 1887 in the Science Schools Journal. Upon graduation from the University of London in 1890 he was a tutor until chronic ill health made him decide to make a serious attempt at being a writer. He brought out A Text-Book of Biology (1893) and began contributing articles and fiction to magazines such as the Pall Mall Gazette. Impoverished and unhappily married, Wells eloped with Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Robbins, a former student of his, whom he later married and by whom he had two sons.

The serialization of The Time Machine in 1895 made Wells famous overnight. A string of other scientific romances—including The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and The First Men in the Moon (1901)—consolidated his reputation.

A socialist who believed in the perfectibility of mankind, Wells focused on utopian social and political themes in works of nonfiction beginning with Anticipations (1901), The Discovery of the Future (1902), Mankind in the Making (1903), A Modern Utopia (1905), and The Future in America (1906). Wells joined the Fabian Society in 1903 but left after fighting an unsuccessful war of wit and rhetoric over its policies with George Bernard Shaw.

Tired of being labeled “the English Jules Verne,” Wells wrote two popular comic novels featuring resilient Cockney heroes who triumph over adversity, Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). The latter underscored one of his most basic themes: “If the world does not please you, you can change it.” A liaison with the young Fabian Amber Reeves inspired the novel Ann Veronica (1909) and produced a daughter, Anna Jane. Also published in 1909 was Tono-Bungay, a panoramic if scathing view of Edwardian England that many regard as his greatest novel.

Wells’s later fiction became increasingly autobiographical. The New Machiavelli (1911) and the best-selling Mr. Bristling Sees It Through (1916) were the most notable. Others, such as Marriage (1912), prompted a young journalist named Rebecca West to dismiss him as the “old maid among novelists.” Yet the two conducted a ten-year love affair and had a son, Anthony West. Wells continued to produce compelling prognostications. Despite having dubbed World War I “the war that will end war,” he wrote The World Set Free (1914), a speculative history of the future that predicted the coming age of nuclear warfare.

In 1920 The Outline of History, an encyclopedic work written to further the cause of world peace, brought Wells to the height of his fame. An international best-seller, the book included this memorable saying: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The same year he traveled to Russia to meet Lenin and reported on the new Communist regime in Russia in the Shadows (1920).

In 1923 Wells ended his relationship with Rebecca West and later moved to the south of France with his new mistress, political exile Odette Keun. There he wrote The World of William Clissold (1926), his most ambitious novel of the period. Upon returning to London in 1930 Wells brought out The Science of Life (1930) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932), two companion volumes to The Outline of History.

With the rise of fascism Wells became less optimistic about the future, and in The Shape of Things to Come (1933) he accurately predicted a second world war that would begin in 1939. However, he journeyed to the United States and Russia in 1934, attempting to promote global peace. Back in England he published his memoirs, the masterful two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934), and worked with Alexander Korda on a film version of The Shape of Things to Come. Though happily involved with Moura Budberg, the Russian spy who was his last companion, Wells remained fatalistic about mankind. The advent of World War II only heightened the author’s despondency as he lived to see many of his dire predictions come true. “Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me,” he bitterly observed. A final work, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), bleakly foretold the destruction of civilization.

H. G. Wells died suddenly and peacefully on August 13, 1946, just a few weeks before turning eighty, at his home in Hanover Terrace, London. Three days later his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the English Channel near the Isle of Wight. A third volume of autobiography, H. G. Wells in Love, appeared posthumously in 1984.