Herbert George ’
H. G. ‘
Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a ‘father of science fiction’, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include
The Time Machi...
Herbert George ’
H. G. ‘
Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a ‘father of science fiction’, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include
The Time Machine (1895),
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896),
The Invisible Man (1897), and
The War of the Worlds (1898). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Wells’s earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels like
Kipps and
The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion, when they were published, that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in
Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. A diabetic, in 1934, Wells co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK).
