H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, the fourth child of a shopkeeper-cricketer father and a domestic-servant mother who returned to service as a housekeeper after the family business failed. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a draper in Windsor — a brutal indenture he would later fictionalise in Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) — and only escaped through teaching assistantships and a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog." Huxley's evolutionary worldview marked everything Wells wrote afterwards. He took a degree in zoology with first-class honours in 1890.

The serial publication of The Time Machine in 1895 made him, almost overnight, a major literary figure at twenty-eight. He followed it with an extraordinary run of what he called "scientific romances": The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), in which a vivisectionist surgically remakes animals into half-human creatures; The Invisible Man (1897); The War of the Worlds (1898), in which Martians invade Surrey and are defeated not by human resistance but by terrestrial bacteria; The First Men in the Moon (1901); The Food of the Gods (1904). These books invented or codified large parts of the science-fiction repertoire — time travel, alien invasion, biological engineering, future war — and they remain readable in a way most Victorian fiction does not.

From roughly 1900 he turned increasingly to social and political writing. He joined the Fabian Society in 1903, quarrelled spectacularly with the Webbs and Shaw over its direction, and left in 1908. Anticipations (1901), A Modern Utopia (1905), and dozens of later books argued for world government, planned economies, free love, and scientifically managed populations. The Outline of History (1920) sold more than two million copies and made him wealthy. The Shape of Things to Come (1933) imagined a second world war beginning in 1940 and a future global state emerging from its rubble. In The World Set Free (1914) he described atomic bombs, dropped from aircraft, that would burn for days — a passage Leo Szilard later said helped inspire his work on the nuclear chain reaction.

The Fabian commitment to "scientific" social planning had a darker side, and Wells did not always stay on the right side of it. He flirted in print with eugenic schemes; he praised aspects of Soviet and Italian governance before recoiling from both; his attitudes toward Jewish identity were patronising and at times worse. His personal life — two marriages, a long affair with Rebecca West that produced their son Anthony, and serial entanglements with other women — was managed with a self-justifying frankness that has aged poorly.

He died in London in 1946, two months after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his last book arguing that the human story was probably over. Read The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine first; The Island of Doctor Moreau if you want the bleakest.