HG Wells Essay Research Paper The Innovations

H.G. Wells Essay, Research Paper

The Innovations and Predictions of H.G. Wells

When one mentions the term “science fiction,” only one name should come to mind: H.G Wells. Wells is indeed best known today as the father of modern science fiction. Over a career that spanned five decades, Wells produced nearly one hundred full-length books, a large number of them novels. The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of Worlds, World Brain, and several other works in Wells’s canon are classics in the field of science fiction that have profoundly influenced the course of the genre. Because Wells soon became one of the best-selling and most controversial writers of his time, leading to immense popularity, critic Frank MacConnell even refers to him “the father, the one genius, even the Shakespeare of science fiction,” (438). His novels are known for employing strong elements of carefully paced suspense as well as for illustrating his remarkable ability to render convincingly the most bizarre and improbable characters and events. He makes frequent use of the mysterious and the horrific as he develops serious artistic themes. Because of his widespread popularity and prominent success, a number of his works have formed the basis of well-known radio and screen productions; one or two of his tales always seem to find their way into anthologies of the modern short story and science fiction. Over the years the tastes of the reading public have changed, however, and his work has not always fared well. Also, his work sometimes “has themes and characters which are too often repeated, and begin to sound stale on successive encounters,” (Dettmar 380). Nevertheless, he remains one of the most important innovators in the history of science fiction. Though quite often overlooked, H.G. Wells used his “Wellsian imagination” to enhance many accurate innovations and predictions in modern science, the most prominent being his prediction of the Internet.

Herbert George Wells was born into a rather lower-middle-class English family in Bromley, Kent, a suburb of London, on September 21, 1866. His father, Joseph Wells, was a celebrated cricket player turned failed shopkeeper. His mother, Sarah Neal Wells, was a housekeeper and a lady’s maid, “whose fondest dream was that young ‘Bertie’ and his two older brothers should become respectable tradesmen in the service of the upper classes,” (Murray 309). When he was nearly seventeen, Wells finally convinced his mother that various apprentice positions left him desperately unhappy. She allowed him to enroll as a pupil-tutor at the Midhurst Grammar School, and to later accept a scholarship at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington (which later became Imperial College, London University). Here, preparing for a teaching career, Wells studied biology, geology, and astronomical physics. After completing his training in Kensington, Wells taught at a wretched boy’s school in Wales. A year later he was back in London, conducting adult education classes at the University Correspondence College. He supplemented his income by selling brief articles on scientific subjects to newspapers and magazines seeking large circulations among members of Britain’s middle and lower classes. On October 31, 1891 Wells married his first cousin Isabel Mary Wells but soon realized that he had committed a serious mistake. The two “were of diverse temperaments and shared few interests- they had married because of an intense and mutual physical attraction and because in late Victorian England young men and women who desired respectability as well as sexual activity had no other choice,” (Murray 309).

Despite his marital discontent and the many distractions of teaching, Wells continued to write. He first attracted notice as a writer in 1893 when he began to publish short stories in such magazines as the Pall Mall Budget and the Pall Mall Gazette. Many of these pieces were based on advances in communication and transportation, employing strange settings and sustained suspense. Wells eventually left his wife and remarried to Amy Catherine Robbins on October 27, 1895. Meanwhile, he continued to turn out great quantities of publishable prose, including his first novel, The Time Machine (1895), followed by The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of Worlds (1898). By the end of the nineteenth century, Wells’s reputation was secure. On the strength of his growing income, he built the Spade House in Sandgate, near Folkestone, where Jane Wells continued to combine her work as Wells’s typist and the organizer of his time with their two small sons, George and Frank. Despite his prolific output of articles and books, Wells managed to still lead a rich and varied life away from the desk. He ran for Parliament as a member of the Labour party; he traveled widely, visiting the Soviet Union and the United States. He held interviews with both Lenin and Theodore Roosevelt and came to know many of the twentieth century’s leading literary and political figures. When H.G. Wells died in 1946, there was not one thing he had not accomplished. He led a happy life, conquering his dreams and taking risks. After all, Wells “was an undersized boy from the working class who heightened the imaginations of readers all over the world and in the process became rich and famous,” (Murray 315). If science fiction is mainly important as technological prophecy, Wells’s reco