Celebrating the life of science-fiction pioneer H.G. Wells

CAIRO – 21 September 2017: September 21 is the day English science-fiction author, journalist and sociologist H.G. Wells was born. He is famous for having written War of the Worlds and The Time Machine and forever influencing the way we think of the future.

Wells was born in Bromley, England in 1866, and came from rather humble origins, being the son of a shopkeeper and a maid. His family lived under the constant threat of poverty, and Wells’s school education was unsatisfactory; he did most of his learning through the many books he read, being quite the voracious bookworm.

At the age of 14, he became a draper’s assistant, though he didn’t last long. He then worked under a chemist, and then another draper, before eventually moving to freelance writing and thrn a student-teacher. Eventually, Wells won a scholarship to study at the Normal School of Science (now the Imperial College), which would feed into his future science-fiction writing.

Come 1895, Wells published the first of his novels, The Time Machine. The story follows a man known only as The Time Traveler who explains to a group that yes, indeed, time travel is possible, and demonstrates it by entering his machine and vanishing. He ends up in the far distant future in the year 802,701, and encounters two distinct races of mankind; the tiny, childish Eloi and the hideous underground Morlocks.


Cover for a book that includes The Time Machine via Chris Dumm on Flickr

The book was an immediate success, and Wells found himself a niche as a strikingly educated and imaginative science-fiction author, delighting the world with his fantastic possibilities. Wells predated incredible scientific advancements such as the moon landing and nuclear bombs, and he helped introduce public fascination for what science could achieve.

A year later, Wells wrote The Island of Dr Moreau the tale of a mad scientist who experimented with creating human-animal hybrids through painful surgical procedures.

The story follows a man who ends up on the island and must survive alongside grotesque beast-men. The end of the book has the main character returning to Britain to find himself the subject of scorn and disbelief, and laments that mankind might be no better than the animals. Strikingly original, The Island of Dr Moreau, like many of Wells’s body of works was adapted numerous times and became a permanent fixture of popular culture.

Wells’s most famous work, and one of the most famous science-fiction tales of all time, was 1898’s War of the Worlds, which popularized the concept of a Martian and was one of the first alien invasion novels. The book plots the invasion of Earth by the residents of Mars, riding on giant tripods that devastate everything in their path as mankind is helpless to stop them. A twist in the book reveals that the Martians are stopped not by humanity’s efforts but by an earth disease, for which the aliens have no defense.


Illustration from 1927’s Amazing Stories for their edition of War of the Worlds via Wikimedia


Becoming a permanent part of popular culture, War of the Worlds has been adapted countless times, the most recent of which was a 2005 Hollywood film directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise. The film was the fourth highest grossing movie of that year and was nominated for 3 Oscars.



Wells also published a large body of non-fiction works, including a series of rather accurate futuristic predictions in his 1901 book Anticipations, where he successfully saw the rise of modern cities, globalization and modern warfare. Alas, Wells once idealistic view of the future gradually grew bleaker, and one of his last books, 1945’s Mind at the End of Its Tether, predicted that mankind would be replaced by a new, more advanced species. The outbreak of World War II had only cemented his hopeless outlook.

He passed away on August 13, 1946, and is remembered as one of the world’s finest minds in science-fiction.



Illustration from 1927’s Amazing Stories for their edition of War of the Worlds via Wikimedia