H. G. WELLS, THE FATHER OF SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS

Herbert George Wells

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of her friend Jordi Santanyí. Jordi is a great writer and they like talking about literature together. They have been talking about H. G. Wells, the great English writer who is considered the father of the science fiction novels and who died on a day like today in 1946.

Everybody remembers the performance of Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds, an episode aired on Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It became famous for allegedly causing mass panic, although the reality of the panic is disputed as the program had relatively few listeners.

Before Jordi's arrival, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 12. Graphics (II) (Spanish Version)

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866-13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the father of science fiction, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.

During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.

His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells 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.

Herbert George Wells

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 such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion 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.

Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. Called Bertie in the family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells -a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer- and his wife, Sarah Neal -a former domestic servant.

An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. Joseph Wells managed to earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the shop and he received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team. Payment for skilled bowlers and batsmen came from voluntary donations afterwards, or from small payments from the clubs where matches were played.

More information: Inside Science

In 1891, Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells (1865-1931; from 1902 Isabel Mary Smith). The couple agreed to separate in 1894, when he had fallen in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (1872–1927; later known as Jane), with whom he moved to Woking, Surrey in May 1895.

Some of his early novels, called scientific romances, invented several themes now classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon. He also wrote realistic novels that received critical acclaim, including Kipps and a critique of English culture during the Edwardian period, Tono-Bungay.

Wells also wrote dozens of short stories including, The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, which helped bring the full impact of Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public, and was followed by many later successes such as The Country of the Blind (1904).

Wells visited Russia in 1914, 1920 and 1934. During his second visit, he saw his old friend Maxim Gorky and with his help, met Vladimir Lenin. In his book Russia in the Shadows, Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation. 

Herbert George Wells

On 23 July 1934, after visiting U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for three hours for the New Statesman magazine, which was extremely rare at that time. He told Stalin how he had seen the happy faces of healthy people in contrast with his previous visit to Moscow in 1920. However, he also criticised the lawlessness, class-based discrimination, state violence, and absence of free expression. Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly.

As the chairman of the London-based PEN Club, which protected the rights of authors to write without being intimidated, Wells hoped by his trip to USSR, he could win Stalin over by force of argument. Before he left, he realized that no reform was to happen in the near future.

Wells's literary reputation declined as he spent his later years promoting causes that were rejected by most of his contemporaries as well as by younger authors whom he had previously influenced. In this connection, George Orwell described Wells as too sane to understand the modern world.

Wells had diabetes, and was a co-founder in 1934 of The Diabetic Association, now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK.

More information: BBC

On 28 October 1940, on the radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Welles, who two years previously had performed a famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. During the interview, by Charles C Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells admitted his surprise at the widespread panic that resulted from the broadcast but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his more obscure titles.

Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park, London.

In his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: I told you so. You damned fools. Wells' body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 16 August 1946; his ashes were subsequently scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks.

A commemorative blue plaque in his honour was installed by the Greater London Council at his home in Regent's Park in 1966.

More information: Express

Human history becomes more and more a race

between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells