Who was H.G. Wells and did he predict the future?

Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, the third son of a professional cricketer and a domestic servant. He was apprenticed to a draper at thirteen, found the work intolerable, won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, studied under T.H. Huxley -- Darwin's most combative defender -- and emerged as one of the most prolific and influential writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He is primarily remembered for a handful of scientific romances published between 1895 and 1901 that have shaped the vocabulary of science fiction ever since. The Time Machine (1895). The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The Invisible Man (1897). The War of the Worlds (1898). When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). The First Men in the Moon (1901). These were all written before he was thirty-five.

Did he predict the future?#

Yes, to a degree that is genuinely striking, and no, in ways that are equally instructive.

What he got right:

In The World Set Free (1914), Wells described atomic bombs -- weapons that release energy through atomic fission -- decades before the Manhattan Project. The physicist Leo Szilard, who was one of the scientists behind the actual development of nuclear weapons, later said that reading Wells had given him the initial conception of a nuclear chain reaction.

In Anticipations (1901) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), Wells described motorway-style road networks, aerial warfare, urban sprawl, and a world government emerging from a catastrophic global conflict. These are not vague extrapolations. They are recognisably accurate descriptions of developments that occurred within decades of his writing.

He also predicted the tank, which was developed in World War One. He described something very like the internet in World Brain (1938) -- a global encyclopedia continuously updated by contributors.

What he got wrong:

He consistently underestimated the persistence of nationalism, religion, and ethnic identity in human affairs. His utopian visions almost always involve a rational world government emerging from technological progress, and he never found a convincing explanation for why human beings, who consistently demonstrate strong attachments to the particular, would prefer the universal.

He also predicted that by the 1960s, the airplane would have made war so devastating that it would force world peace. He was half right about the devastation.

What was his personal life like?#

Wells was married twice and had many affairs, several of which produced children. He had a long relationship with the writer Rebecca West, who was twenty-six years his junior and with whom he had a son. He was frank about his sexual philosophy -- that conventional monogamy was an irrational constraint -- in ways that made him controversial in his lifetime and have aged less well than his science.

He was a socialist, a eugenicist (this is the part of his thought that has aged worst), and a prolific writer of social theory and history. His Outline of History (1920) was one of the bestselling non-fiction books of the 20th century.

He died on 13 August 1946 at his home in London, leaving his last book Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) as an unusually bleak final note -- a suggestion that the human experiment might be running out of time.

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Further reading#

For the best Wells novels to start with, the best classic science fiction in the public domain covers The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man with specific recommendations.

The Time Machine is free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Michael Sherborne, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, Peter Owen, 2010
• David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, Yale University Press, 1986
• H.G. Wells, The World Set Free, 1914 (free, Project Gutenberg)