H.G. Wells: The Father of Modern Science Fiction

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Today’s protagonist grew up as a destitute child in Victorian England. Fueled by a thirst for knowledge and self-improvement, he turned to books for companionship and to writing as a means of fostering his ideas during those lonely days. Two fears burrowed deep into his mind: that he would never become famous and that he would die a virgin. If we could use the titular invention from one of his novels, we’d go back in time to reassure the boy. We would tell him, “Have faith, Bertie. Your books are to sell in the millions. Your ideas will influence generations of writers and even help shape society. And don’t worry about another thing; you’ll see plenty of action.”

Welcome to today’s biographics, in which we’ll learn about the life, works, and loves of Herbert George Wells, one of the fathers of modern science fiction.

Herbert George Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, England, the youngest of four children. The whole family referred to him as Bertie. His father, Joseph (known as Joe), was a former gardener and professional cricketer turned shopkeeper. His mother, Sarah, had been a ladies’ maid before marrying Joe and founding their unsuccessful business venture, Atlas House, which sold chinaware and sporting goods. Joe and Sarah did not have a happy marriage, and financial woes only added to the discord that grew naturally out of their differences in character. Sarah was anxious and inclined to pessimism, while Joe was irresponsible but also an irredeemable optimist who believed in personal growth. In later life, Wells’s character and worldview would swing between these two extremes, but as a schoolboy, he sided squarely with team Joe, adopting an optimistic attitude and diving headlong into study and self-improvement.

He read voraciously from an early age, especially when a broken leg immobilized him at the age of seven. By age 13, he had written his first complete work, “The Desert Daisy,” a humorous comic strip, while excelling in his studies at the Bromley Academy, a private school. However, as he turned 14, Joe and Sarah could no longer afford the school fees, and Bertie and his two elder brothers were sent into the world as apprentices with a draper. Bertie was fired by his first employer and joined Sarah in Upper House, West Sussex, after she separated from Joe. She became the housekeeper of this upper-class residence, where Bertie took to studying Latin and sciences as necessary steps to become a chemist apprentice. He excelled in all scientific subjects, but there was a catch: the pharmacist who was going to employ him was not going to offer him a salary. Worse still, he expected payment to have Wells as an apprentice. Neither parent could afford this, so Bertie had to return to a business he hated: drapery.

From 1881 to 1883, he loathed every minute he spent at Hyde’s Drapery Emporium in Southsea, Hampshire. Bertie worked 13-hour days, slept in a crowded dormitory with the other apprentices, and endured constant bullying by the shop manager. But he never gave up on his studies, vowing to dedicate all of his spare time to studying. After two years of this rigorous routine, he received an offer to join Midhearst Grammar School in West Sussex as a student and teacher’s assistant. By September of 1883, Bertie was rid of drapery and ready to start at Midhearst, but it came at a price. To leave the apprenticeship, Hyde’s Emporium demanded a fee, which Sarah paid by draining her life savings. Was it a good investment? It appears so, as Bertie thrived in an academic environment.

In 1884, he entered the Normal School of Science in London, attending the biology class of T.H. Huxley, a vocal supporter of Darwinism. Thanks to his good grades, Bertie obtained a government scholarship for trainee teachers and was set on to the next stage of his life. Bertie loved Huxley’s biology and zoology lessons, the influence of which would be found in his later works. However, after his favorite professor fell ill, Bertie realized that the rest of the faculty was not up to scratch. After a brilliant first year, the young Wells gradually neglected his studies, plunging into extracurricular activities. He dedicated most of his time to literature and politics, preaching socialism at student debating societies and attracting a circle of open-minded, rebellious students. With their help, he founded the Science Schools Journal, which became a vehicle for his first efforts at scientific romance, the genre that we now call science fiction. One of these was “The Chronic Argonauts,” the first incarnation of what would later become “The Time Machine.”

In the summer of 1887, he failed his final geology exam and left the Normal School of Science without a degree. Luckily, Wells landed on his feet and secured a teaching post at Halt Academy in Wales. During his brief time there, he enjoyed the occasional game of football with his pupils, but during one of these matches, a pupil tackled Wells so badly that he suffered from a crushed kidney and a lung hemorrhage. To top it all off, the young teacher was also diagnosed with tuberculosis and had to leave his job. Wells joined his mother at the Uppark residence to recuperate and was once again fit for work in autumn of 1888. This is when his teaching career properly took off. Wells taught science at the Henley House School in London, a small institution with only 13 pupils, one of whom was A.A. Milne, the future creator of “Winnie the Pooh.” Wells also resumed his university studies, earning his Bachelor of Science in 1890, with a first class in zoology and a second in geology.

The big event of this period was that Wells had fallen in love, and she loved him back. Her name was Isabelle Mary Wells. Apparently, it wasn’t only royals and aristocrats who married amongst cousins; Bertie and Isabelle married on October 30, 1891, and moved to the London Borough of Wandsworth. In addition to teaching, he took on additional writing jobs, mainly for scientific and educational publications. Wells’s “Textbook of Biology,” published in 1893, remained in use for the next 30 years. In 1891, Wells’s health deteriorated again, most likely due to another bout of tuberculosis, and he had to give up teaching again, relying entirely on freelance writing to support Isabelle and himself.

After some of his rigorous scientific articles had been rejected by publishers, he returned to the genre of scientific romance, which he expressed in the form of adventurous short stories and prophetic writings on the future of society. The late Victorian period had a thirst for adventurous tales that combined wild imagination and plausible science. In the wake of French author Jules Verne, Wells would give them just what they needed with his first novel, “The Time Machine,” published in 1895. Wells’s unnamed time traveler hops to the year 802,701. Thanks to his invention, the future society appears to be a utopia in which the descendants of humans, the Eloi, live free from labor and need inside communal accommodation. However, the traveler soon finds out that the Eloi live in constant fear of the brutish Morlocks, who live underground, performing all menial tasks needed to keep society going. The Morlocks, also descendants of the human race, crawl out at night to feast on the passive Eloi. The traveler speculates that the class divide between the rich and the poor in the future has become so extreme that they’ve evolved into separate species.

According to Matthew Taunton, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, the author’s intention was to portray socialism gone wrong, where the cannibalistic proletariat prey on the effete aristocracy. It’s an interesting point, as Wells was and always remained a proponent of socialism, pushing for broad societal reforms, yet he seemed to issue some early warnings about the dangers of violent revolutionary change. The success of “The Time Machine” was followed by a surge of creativity. Between 1896 and 1901, the author completed some of his best-known novels: “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” “The Invisible Man,” “The War of the Worlds,” and “The First Men in the Moon.”

We would love to spend a few words on each one of these and other masterpieces, but time and word counts are ruthless tyrants. Luckily, you can read most of Wells’s productions for free online. I’ll only focus on one today: “The War of the Worlds.” This is the book that set the blueprint for alien invasion fiction. In a few words, a Martian landing party flies to Earth, massacring and destroying everything in their path. Humanity is defenseless until the aliens are defeated. The original plot line came from Bertie’s brother Frank, who, while trekking across Surrey and Kent, proposed that some beings from another planet might drop out of the sky. Wells combined Frank’s suggestion with the popular genre of invasion literature in the Victorian period, where novels depicted the British military fighting invasions from technologically superior enemies.

Wells imagines the landing of an unstoppable extraterrestrial force wielding weapons of mass destruction beyond anything humanity had devised thus far. What really strikes home is that the invasion is not described from the point of view of a politician, a scientist, or a military leader in some large city, as would become a later staple of the genre. Wells’s unnamed protagonist is just an ordinary person residing in a leafy, middle-class suburb, a countryside permeated by the visible and desirable consequences of colonialism and imperialism. But it takes only one mysterious cylinder to land, and the top superpower of the time, Great Britain, becomes a victim of ruthless colonizers.

The success of his scientific romance novels brought wealth and recognition to Mr. Wells, but he had loftier ambitions. He craved recognition as a serious intellectual, so in the early years of the 20th century, the author directed his efforts toward a series of semi-autobiographical novels and social essays in which he forecasted a desirable future for humanity. “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” published in 1900, draws heavily from Wells’s own life and experiences. The protagonist, Mr. Lewisham, is an impoverished yet ambitious science teacher with grand plans to climb the social ladder. These plans are largely thrown into the wind when he’s distracted by a passionate on-and-off relationship with a beautiful woman named Ethel Henderson. They eventually marry, although their relationship is complicated by the antics of Ethel’s stepfather, a mystic medium and con man. Eventually, Lewisham must admit defeat; his plans for a brighter future will never come to fruition. Bitterly, he concludes, “The future? What are we? But servants or traitors to that?”

The novel “Kips,” published in 1905, contains yet more autobiographical elements. The titular character is adopted by a couple of shopkeepers in Kent and is later apprenticed to a draper. When Kips inherits a fortune from a long-lost grandfather, he has to negotiate the complex rules of the English class system. As you may have inferred, social mobility and class relations are recurring topics in Wells’s work, appearing also in his futuristic social writings such as “Anticipations” of 1901 and “A Modern Utopia” of 1905. In his “Anticipations,” Wells predicted a world unified into a single state at peace with itself, rationally governed by a middle class of scientists. Most languages would disappear, with only English, French, and Chinese being spoken by future societies. These would be split into four classes: a shareholding class at the top, a productive middle class of mechanics and engineers, a non-productive middle class of clerks and mid-level managers, and finally, the “abyss people,” without property or a clear role in the functioning of society. Taking a dark turn, Wells indicates that a successful world government is one that educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its people of the abyss—in other words, eugenics—a concept which the writer thankfully abandoned shortly thereafter.

During those years, Wells did not abandon science fiction completely. In the early 1900s, his scientific romances explored the potential of military technology on the evolution of society. A short story, “The Land Ironclads,” published in 1903, introduced the concept of an armored all-terrain fighting vehicle. Winston Churchill later claimed that this story inspired the creation of the tank. His later novels, “The War in the Air” and “The World Set Free,” prophesied the introduction of long-range air bombing raids and even atomic weapons. In both works, the use of these weapons brings about a total collapse of society, but in “The World Set Free,” this is followed by the creation of a new peaceful and prosperous world order in which all nations submit to a single government.

Wells’s growing fame attracted the attention of the Fabian Society, a group of socialist intellectuals who were proponents of gradual social reform. Leading figures included playwright George Bernard Shaw and founders of the London School of Economics, Beatrice and Sydney Webb. In 1903, they invited Wells to join their ranks, but he soon disagreed with them, accusing the society of being little more than a debate club for middle-class socialists who lacked the drive for real change. From their side, the Fabians were quick to retaliate, attacking Wells because of his promiscuous and immoral love life.

Based on the last section, Mr. Wells may appear as someone who was married to his writing desk. They did have many children, after all, but his life was not devoid of carnal passion. Far from it, in fact. His lust for the pleasures of the flesh eventually alienated his wife, Isabelle, who simply did not share the same taste for conjugal visits. According to Wells, Isabelle thought that lovemaking was nothing more than an outrage inflicted upon reluctant womankind. After marrying Isabelle, Wells had already started a relationship with a student of his, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane. Jane and Bertie moved in together in January 1894. Wells obtained a divorce from Isabelle exactly one year later, and the new couple married on October 27, 1895. The couple went on to have two sons, George Philip and Frank Richard. While Jane was pregnant with George, Wells argued that her body and overall health were too fragile to withstand his amorous requests. In other words, Bertie claimed the right to sleep around with other women while Jane was expecting, and it seems like Jane was happy with the arrangement.

Between 1895 and 1914, Wells had frequent affairs with students, writers, and journalists, seduced by his blue eyes and magnetic rhetoric. The most notable lover was a young Cambridge student and Fabian member, Amber Reeves. When Wells learned that Amber was expecting his child, he hurriedly arranged for her to marry a young barrister, George Rivers Blanco White. At that time, Wells was trying to wrest control of the Fabian Society from George Bernard Shaw’s hands. When in 1908 news spread of the affair and the questionable arrangement, the writer was expelled from the society. As usual, Jane was an incredibly patient wife, even welcoming Amber into their family life and helping her buy baby clothes. Their baby daughter, Anna Jane, would be acknowledged by Wells only in 1929.

The next love of Wells’s life was a feminist journalist, Cicely Isabel Fairfield, known as Rebecca West. West attracted Wells’s attention with one of her scathing reviews, which turned into a friendship that evolved into an affair. In late 1913, Rebecca bore her son, Anthony West, on August 4, 1914. Just as baby Anthony cried his way into life, Great Britain was declaring war on Germany, and World War I was breaking out—a conflict that would see many of Wells’s most deadly anticipations leap from the page into reality. The writer was not a pacifist; he wrote a series of passionate articles blaming the Central Empires for plunging the world into deadly chaos. Only their defeat could put an end to widespread militarism and restore lasting peace on Earth. These articles were later collected in the volume “The War That Will End War” in 1914, a book that popularized the phrase “the war to end all wars,” coined by Wells but later attributed to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

Wells was too old to join the fight, of course, but he did serve the war effort. In 1918, he was recruited by the Ministry of Propaganda, where his duty was to draft the war aims of the Triple Entente. As a supporter of a unified world government to ensure peace, Wells included among these aims the setting up of the League of Nations. In the interwar years, this organization proved largely ineffective, and its chief proponent became one of its worst critics—a not uncommon pattern in Wells’s life. For example, in September and October of 1920, the writer traveled to Moscow to meet Lenin and Trotsky. While initially impressed by the pragmatic, energetic action of the Bolsheviks, he later described Russia as a country nearing a state of total collapse.

In the same year, Wells published another non-fiction work, “The Outline of History.” His aim was to describe the whole of human history and how humanity had evolved since its inception. The underlying subtext was that the key to peace, progress, and security were neither nationalism nor revolution, but rather education. “The Outline of History” proved incredibly popular, bringing Wells new fame and plenty of face time with world leaders. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, for example, in 1934, he met with Franklin D. Roosevelt and later got to interview Joseph Stalin for the magazine “The New Statesman.” The writer was not impressed by the Soviet leader’s mental acumen, writing that he had little of the quick uptake of President Roosevelt and none of the subtlety and tenacity of Lenin. His was not a free, impulsive brain or a scientifically organized brain; it was a trained Leninist Marxist brain. The two disagreed on the present and future of capitalism. According to Wells, it was a doomed system that needed to be reformed peacefully to achieve economic justice for all classes, while Stalin believed that capitalism was still too strong and needed to be violently torn down. Despite their differences, Wells left the interview with an overall positive impression of the Georgian dictator, stating, “I’ve never met a man more fair, candid, and honest.”

While dabbling in the world’s current affairs, Bertie did not neglect his more private affairs. He parted ways with Rebecca West in 1923, and his long-suffering wife Jane died of cancer in 1927. But the sprightly 61-year-old still yearned for love and quickly started a new relationship with 22-year-old Dutch socialist Adet Kuhn. When the affair ended a few years later, Bertie rekindled his acquaintance with an old