Futurist





A futurist and “visionary”, Wells foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.

Asserting that "Wells' visions of the future remain "unsurpassed", 
John Higgs, author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,

states that in the late 19th century Wells “saw the coming century clearer than anyone else.



He anticipated:

•wars in the air,

•the sexual revolution,

•motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs
and a
•proto-Wikipedia he called the "world brain".



In his novel The World Set Free, he imagined an “atomic bomb” of terrifying power that would be dropped from aeroplanes.



This was an extraordinary insight for an author writing in 1913, and it made a deep impression on Winston Churchill."

In 2011, Wells was among a group of science fiction writers featured in the Prophets of Science Fiction series, a show produced and hosted by film director Sir Ridley Scott, which depicts how predictions influenced the development of scientific advancements by inspiring many readers to assist in transforming those futuristic visions into everyday reality.




In a 2013 review of The Time Machine for the New Yorker magazine, Brad Leithauser writes,

"At the base of Wells's great visionary exploit is this rational, ultimately scientific attempt to tease out the potential future consequences of present conditions—not as they might arise in a few years, or even decades, but millennia hence, epochs hence. He is world literature's Great Extrapolator. Like no other fiction writer before him, he embraced "deep time."

Literary influence and legacy

The science fiction historian John Clute describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen", and notes his work has been central to both British and American science fiction.






Science fiction author and critic Algis Budrys said Wells "remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the despair, which are embodied in the technology and which are the major facts of life in our world".






He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, 1932, 1935, and 1946.



Wells so influenced real exploration of space that an impact crater on Mars (and the Moon) was named after him.

Wells's genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air. Originality was Wells's calling card.




In a six-year stretch from 1895 to 1901, he produced a stream of what he called “scientific romance” novels, which included:

•The Time Machine, 

•The Island of Doctor Moreau, 

•The Invisible Man, 

•The War of the Worlds 

and 

•The First Men in the Moon.

This was a dazzling display of new thought, endlessly copied since.


A book like The War of the Worlds inspired every one of the thousands of alien invasion stories that followed. It burned its way into the psyche of mankind and changed us all forever.

— Cultural historian John Higgs, The Guardian.

THE TIME MACHINE



The sci-fi novel that actually gave us the term: 'time machine'.

The story starts with a narrator telling his dinner guests about the Time Traveller's machine and how it allowed him to travel through the fourth dimension, and how he has built such a machine himself.



He returns the following week with a tale of how he has used it and where it took him. He talks of his journey to the year A.D. 802,701, where he finds that the state of the human race has changed considerably, and where he discovered two distinct peoples; the Eloi, and, the Morlocks.



He originally believed that they shared a kind of 'Lord/Servant' relationship. However, he realised that it was more like that of 'Ranchers/Livestock'.




The Time Machine had been adapted into three films, two television versions, and many comic books, as well as being a huge influence in the genre of science fiction.


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The Island of Dr. Moreau



Ranked among the classic novels of the English language and the inspiration for several unforgettable movies, this early work of H. G. Wells was greeted in 1896 by howls of protest from reviewers, who found it horrifying and blasphemous.



They wanted to know more about the wondrous possibilities of science shown in his first book, The Time Machine, not its potential for misuse and terror.


In The Island of Dr. Moreau, a shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick, stranded on a Pacific island lorded over by the notorious
Dr. Moreau, confronts dark secrets, strange creatures, and a reason to run for his life.


While this riveting tale was intended to be a commentary on evolution, divine creation, and the tension between human nature and culture,
modern readers familiar with genetic engineering will marvel at Wells’s prediction of the ethical issues raised by producing “smarter” human beings or bringing back extinct species.




These levels of interpretation add a richness to Prendick’s adventures on Dr. Moreau’s island of lost souls without distracting from what is still a rip-roaring good read.

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The Invinsibel Man

The Invinsibel Man
is a 1897 science fiction novel by H. G. Wells.





It tells the story of Griffin; a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to make himself invisible by making it so his body reflects no light.



He is successful in carrying this out on himself but cannot reverse it.

The Invisible Man was a big influence on sci-fi writers, but H. G. Wells also took inspiration to create the book.

Bab Ballads by W.S. Gilbert includes the rhyme: 'Old Peter vanished like a shot - but then - his suit of clothes did not.'



He was also influenced by Plato's Republic which, in the legend of the Ring of Gyges, says that: if a man were made invisible and could act with impunity, he would 'go about among men with the powers of a god'.

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War of the Worlds



H. G. Wells' classic science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, tells the tale of aliens from Mars, invading earth, narrated by an unnamed man from Surrey, England.




Giant cylinders crash to Earth, out of which come unearthly creatures armed with heat-rays and fighting machines.

Amid the boundless destruction they cause, it looks as if the end of the world has come.



Suffering an almost complete mental breakdown, our narrator is about to end it all, when he discovers that the aliens aren't that well suited for earth after all.

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The First Men In The Moon



The First Men In The Moon is a 1901 book by British author H. G. Wells. It tells the story of Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor, who take a journey to the moon, only to find it inhabited by an advanced race of insect like creatures who they call 'Selenites'.



After being captured by the aliens and fighting them, Bedford escapes and gets back down to earth.


Cavor however, is trapped up there, and for a while, sends radio messages down to Bedford, until they too, stop.

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The War in The Air



The story of Bert Smallways, a brilliant mechanist and accidental aeronaut, who finds himself as a reluctant stowaway upon the Vaterland, an airship piloted by a German Prince.

Espionage, intrigue and daring adventures in the skies.

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Mary-San

This popular Japanese urban legend is about a porcelain doll that, after being abandoned by her owner, decides to murder her. 


 

A family was getting ready to move houses when the young daughter’s beloved doll, Mary, was accidentally thrown away. The girl was extremely sad and wept to her parents.
“It’s okay, we’ll buy you a new doll,” they said, and the girl unwillingly accepted.


As she got used to her life in a new place, the girl eventually forgot about Mary-San.

Then one night she got a call at home. Her parents hadn’t returned yet, so she answered.
“Hello?”
“…”
“Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s Mary-San. I’m in the garbage dump now.”
“Huh?!”
The phone hung up.
Mary? That was the name of the doll she lost. She put it down to a prank call, but it still bothered her.


Then the phone rang again.
Although she thought it might be the same prank caller, it might also have been her parents, so she picked up the phone.
“Hello, Mum?”
“It’s Mary-San. I’m at the Corner store now.”
The phone hung up again. That store, it was near her house. For a prank call, something sure was strange, the girl began to think.


Then the phone rang again.
‘It’s gotta be Mary-San again,’ the girl thought, but she convinced herself it might be her mother and picked up the receiver.
“Hello, Mum? Is that you? Come home, quick!”
“This is Mary-San. I’m in front of OO.”
The phone hung up.

OO was the shop near the girl’s house. It was then the girl realised that the perpetrator of the prank calls was gradually getting closer.

An indescribable fear began to gnaw away at her heart.
‘I’m in danger,’ she thought. She picked up the phone to call her mother’s cell, but at the same time the phone rang, causing her to answer it accidentally.
“…Yes?”
“This is Mary-San. I’m in front of your house now, OO-chan.”
The phone hung up.

The girl trembled with fear. Not only did the person on the other end of the line know her name, they were standing in front of her house.
She pulled the phone line out of the wall and peered outside.
There was nobody there. There was just a dim light cast over the road from the streetlights.
Unable to stand it any longer, the girl checked the front door was locked, then went to run upstairs to lock herself in her room.

But then the phone rang. The same phone she’d pulled out of the wall.
There was no way it could ring. No idea what was going on, and her fear and anger laid bare, the girl picked up the phone.
“Who is this?! Stop it right now!”

“This is Mary-San. I’m right behind you now.”

The Innkeeper’s Clever Daughter


Once there was a nobleman and he had three Jewish tenants on his estate.
One held the forest concession, another operated the mill, the third, the poorest of them, ran the inn.

One day the nobleman summoned the three and said to them, “I am going to put to you three questions:
‘Which is the swiftest thing in the world?
Which is the fattest?
Which is the dearest?’

The one who answers correctly all of these questions won’t have to pay me any rent for ten years.
And whoever fails to give me the correct answer, I’ll send packing from my estate.”

The Jew who had the forest concession and the one who operated the mill did not think very long and decided between them to give the following answers:
“The swiftest thing in the world is the nobleman’s horse, the fattest is the nobleman’s pig, and the dearest is the nobleman’s wife.”

The poor innkeeper, however, went home feeling very much worried.
He had only three days’ time to answer the
nobleman’s questions.
He racked his brains.
What answers could he give?
Now the innkeeper had a daughter.She was pretty and clever.


“What is worrying you so, father?”she asked.
He told her about the nobleman’s three questions.
“Why shouldn’t I worry?”he cried. “I’ve thought and thought but I cannot find the answers!”
“There is nothing to worry about,father,” she told him.
“The questions are very easy:
The swiftest thing in the world is thought,
the fattest is the earth,
the dearest is sleep.”

When the three days were up the three Jewish tenants went to see the landowner.
Pridefully the first two gave the answers they had agreed upon before hand,thinking that the landowner would feel flattered by them.

“You’re wrong!” cried the nobleman.
“Now pack up and leave my estate right away and don’t you dare to come back!”
But, when he heard the innkeeper’s answers he was filled with wonder.

“I like your answers very much,” he told him, “but I know you didn’t think them up by yourself.
Confess—who gave you the answers?”
“It was my daughter,” the innkeeper answered. “Your daughter!” exclaimed the nobleman in surprise.
“Since she is so clever I’d very much like to see her. Bring her to me in three days’ time.

But listen carefully: she must come here neither walking nor riding, neither dressed nor naked.
She must also bring me a gift that is not a gift.”