At the end of the 19th century people felt excited over the new discoveries of science, which seemed to promise so much for the future. No English writer expressed this feeling so well as Herbert George Wells (1866-1946). He was born at Bromley in Kent and grew up in poverty and hardship. He struggled to educate himself by winning scholarships, and studied biology under T H Huxley. He used his knowledge of science as the starting point for a series of exciting and fantastic stories, such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Some of their most startling ideas have since come true. As a novelist, he is best remembered for his science fiction novels, but his literary output was vast and extremely varied. Before he became a successful novelist, Wells worked as a draper’s apprentice, a chemist’s assistant and a teacher. He knew about the problems of ordinary people, and wrote about their ambitions and disappointments in novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which are full of life and humour. Wells became a socialist and wrote many books about history and science so that people would be able to understand the important ideas of the modern world. These works include The Shape of Things to Come, The Science of Life and a popular history book, The Outline of History.
Top Posts & Pages
The Inn at the Edge of the World
Click image to read my short story 'The Inn at the Edge of the World' in Bardic Tales and Sage Advice, Vol. 8.
The Witch of Wicken Fen
Click image to read my short story 'The Witch of Wicken Fen' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Tolkien
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Another Road to Middle Earth
Fifty years after its first publication, The Lord of the Rings found a new and even larger audience in a new medium, the three films directed by Peter Jackson and released in successive years 2001–2003. These are some of the most successful films ever made. The three between them had taken some £1,279 million at the […]
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After the King: Tolkien’s heirs
It is something of a relief, having looked last month at his critics, to turn this time to Tolkien’s many admirers. It would not be true to say that there was no such thing as epic fantasy before Tolkien: there was a tradition of English and Irish writers before him, such as E R Eddison and […]
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Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics
“This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.” With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgment of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of […]
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The Wolf in the Attic
1920s Oxford: home to C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and, in Paul Kearney’s novel The Wolf in the Attic, Anna Francis, a young Greek girl looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work all around them. Anna lives in a […]
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Of Wood Woses and Wild Men
In The Lord of the Rings a strange and primitive folk named the Woses came to aid the men of Gondor in breaking the siege of Minas Tirith. These wild woodland people lived in the ancient forest of Druadan, below the White Mountains. In form they were weather-worn, short-legged, thick-armed and stumpy-bodied and they knew wood-craft […]
Fabulous Realms 