He was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, one of London’s fast-growing suburbs, to a pair of servants-turned-shopkeepers. He came to see his father as a failure and his mother as a religious fanatic, and treated his older brothers with “vindictive resentment and clamorous aggression.” As a boy, he fantasised about mighty battles in the fields of Kent, in which he played the benign dictator who could wrench the masses back onto the right path with his unparalleled wisdom and strength. In 1934, startlingly, he described Hitler as “nothing more than one of my thirteen year old reveries come real.” Rejecting the paths laid out for him—religious conformity and the drapery business—he secured a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington in 1884. It was his first feat of self-escape.
Studying under the evolutionary biologist Thomas Henry Huxley strengthened Wells’s belief in both the potential of science to cure humankind’s ills, and its fragility. Reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty sparked his curiosity about socialism. In one combination or another, these two interests would guide his thinking for the rest of his life. With his charm, wit, energy and bracing intolerance for orthodoxy and humbug, Wells became a star of the Debating Society. His talk “The Past and Present of the Future Race” explored ideas that would reappear in his novels. He began writing short stories about the future, too. But his strengths did not include exam performance, and he left South Kensington after three years with a crushing sense of rejection and panic. “I had done practically everything necessary to ensure failure and dismissal, but when these came they found me planless and amazed.”
Wells became a schoolteacher. In 1891, he ventured into journalism with his essay “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” describing science as “a match that man has just got alight”—one which, instead of illuminating a room full of wonders, draws attention to the vast darkness beyond its puny glow. This first Age of Anxiety afflicted Britain as well as America. During the last years of the century, many writers were consumed by the idea of decadence and decline. Before he became an apostle of progress, Wells tapped into the apocalyptic vein of his imagination, with spectacular success.
The New Review began serialising Wells’s first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, and immediately struck a nerve. The Review of Reviews declared, “H. G. Wells is a man of genius.” For over a century, writers had been transporting characters to the future via a long sleep. It took Wells to come up with the time machine and therefore the concept of time travel. According to James Gleick in Time Travel: A History, “When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.” His pessimism was just as innovative. The critic Mark Hillegas called The Time Machine“the first well-executed, imaginatively coherent picture of a future worse than the present.” The word Wellsian came to mean belief in an orderly scientific utopia, but the four science-fiction landmarks he wrote between 1895 and 1898—The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds—not to mention short stories such as “A Story of the Days to Come,” are cautionary tales of progress thwarted, science abused and complacency punished. Wells was not yet Wellsian.
His career was up and running. “It’s rather pleasant to find oneself something in the world after all the years of trying and disappointment,” he told his mother. He quickly made literary friends, many of whom also had the restive insecurity of outsiders, and saw in the new century at a spectacular house party in Sussex, hosted by the American novelist Stephen Crane, in the company of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard and Ford Madox Ford. “It did not take us long to realize that here was Genius,” wrote Ford. “Authentic, real Genius . . . And all Great London lay prostrate at his feet.”
Wells was often called England’s answer to Jules Verne, but both writers rejected the comparison. “I make use of physics,” said Verne. “He invents.” Among other things, the much older man represented a more optimistic generation. Wells spoke to a time when everybody realised that immense change was happening but nobody knew whether it was leading to heaven or hell. Science could create celestial miracles or unspeakable monstrosities. Great men could be benevolent supermen or power-crazed maniacs. The future must lead, via entropy, to the icy black void but perhaps, before then, to paradise. Wells filled the reader’s head with wonders: spacemen, beast-men and men who could not be seen; time machines, flying machines and death machines; a “world of cooling stars and battling dinosaurs,” as Orwell put it.
Wells assimilated new material at terrific speed. He would seize on some new theory or invention, combine it with one of the latest fictional trends—lost worlds, double identities, foreign invasions, mad scientists—and ground it in reality by using some device—a machine, a door, a scientific experiment—to transport his protagonist from Victorian England to another time or place. “I had realised that the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting,” he wrote. He dreamed up The War of the Worlds while cycling around Woking, imposing Martian tripods onto the Surrey countryside, and taking great pleasure in “selecting South Kensington for feats of particular atrocity.”
Wells’s early science fiction was exhilarating because it swarmed with ideas rather than messages. His imagination was too large and conflicted to stiffen into didacticism. In a review of another writer, he offered some sound advice that he later forgot: “the philosopher who masquerades as a novelist, violating the conditions of art that his gospel may win notoriety, discredits both himself and his message.” The War of the Worlds may contain an implicit critique of imperialism but that has no bearing on the reader’s enjoyment, and the only character with a clear plan for the future is the Artilleryman, a proto-fascist blowhard who looks forward to building a new society of “able-bodied, clean-minded men.” If Wells’s hopes were outsized, then so were his fears, and his early work was a struggle to reconcile his reason with his nightmares.
That dissonance was particularly intense in his 1899 novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, the first time that politics overtook science in his fiction. As a gripping read, Wells later admitted, it fell short of its peers. Overworked, he rushed the conclusion and only fixed some of the structural problems when he rewrote it in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes. But it still became one of the most enduringly influential anti-utopias. “Everyone who has ever read The Sleeper Wakes [sic] remembers it,” Orwell wrote. “It is a vision of a glittering, sinister world in which society has hardened into a caste system and the workers are permanently enslaved.” That word again: glittering. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it describes both the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love.
Wells was unapologetically inspired by Edward Bellamy, to the point of making his Sleeper, Graham, acknowledge that Looking Backward “oddly anticipated this actual experience.” But when Graham wakes up from a trance after 203 years, he does not find a socialist paradise. London has evolved instead into a mega-city of thirty-three million souls: a “gigantic glass hive” where the privileged grow flabby in decadent “Pleasure Cities” while, far below them, the masses toil in squalor. Wells called it “our contemporary world in a state of highly inflamed distention.”
The genealogy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and indeed all dystopian fiction, starts here. The role of technology is to maintain control. The enslaved masses are uniformed in blue like Orwell’s Outer Party, and kept in line by the Labour Police. Children are raised in state crèches. Books are burned, pornography rampant, and the English language crudely reduced, with print replaced by phonographs and “kinetotelephotographs,” Wells’s version of the telescreen. On every street, Babble Machines blurt propaganda, advertisements, and “idiotic slang,” and hypnotists stand ready “to print permanent memories on the mind . . . conversely memories could be effaced, habits removed, and desires eradicated—a sort of psychic surgery was, in fact, in general use.” The problem with Wells’s “nightmare of capitalism triumphant” is that it is not fully a nightmare. “It suffers from vast cont
radictions,” wrote Orwell, “because of the fact that Wells, as the arch-priest of ‘progress,’ cannot write with any conviction against ‘progress.’ ”
While Graham sleeps, compound interest makes him the unspeakably rich, quasi-divine “Master of the Earth,” and the world is ruled on his behalf by his trustees, the White Council. His awakening is no chance event but a plot to facilitate a coup led by Ostrog, a brutal Nietzschean strongman who rubbishes socialism and democracy as “worn-out dreams of the nineteenth century.” Before Graham can talk himself into fighting Ostrog, he has to get over his admiration for the cruelly efficient rulers and their marvellous machines, and to develop some fellow feeling for the “monstrous crowds.” Wells seems as disappointed as Graham to find that this hi-tech state is incompatible with liberty, describing his conflicted hero’s revolt as “the impulse of passionate inadequacy against inevitable things.” The author gives Ostrog a brilliantly villainous monologue:
The hope of mankind—what is it? That some day the Overman may come, that some day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated . . . The world is no place for the bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty—it’s a fine duty too!—is to die. The death of the failure! That is the path by which the beast rose to manhood, by which man goes on to higher things.
Yet Ostrog is a baleful version of the kind of capable, anti-democratic elitist that Wells would spend the rest of his life valorising. The character’s name alluded to Moisey Ostrogorsky, a Russian political scientist whose work Wells admired. So the writer could not decide whether Ostrog was merely a brutal tyrant or a visionary with a point.
As the new century drew near, Wells saw a gap in the market for a man who could describe the shape of things to come. “For this year,” he told his agent in 1899, “I’m the futurity man.” The world was entering the age of the motor car, the motion picture and the aeroplane; of socialism, feminism and free love (a cause in which Wells took an energetic personal interest); of upheavals in every area of life. “The old local order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the earth,” he wrote in 1905’s A Modern Utopia, “and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions.” Just as he had articulated the fears of the 1890s, he now sought to express the high hopes of the 1900s, and fiction was no longer enough.
Wells called Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought “the keystone to the main arch of my work.” Unlike his scientific romances, it was to be an unprecedented work of “sober forecasting” based on contemporary trends: a discipline he called “Human Ecology.” The technological soothsaying was merely the bait, he told a friend; Anticipations was “designed to undermine and destroy the monarch, monogamy, faith in God & respectability—& the British Empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars & electrical heating.”
Wells firmly believed that scientific progress was incompatible with existing social and political structures. Humankind’s best hope, therefore, was a single World State governed by a meritocratic elite. In Anticipations this ruling clique was named the New Republic, after Plato; later, he called it the Samurai, then the Open Conspiracy. But while the fundamental idea remained intact, Wells kept changing his mind about who the members of this elite should be, how they should reorganise society, and whether they could be trusted not to abuse their power. Joseph Conrad was quick to spot Wells’s fatal weakness: “Generally the fault I find with you is that you do not take sufficient account of human imbecility which is cunning and perfidious.” It was not that Wells didn’t recognise irrationality; more that he believed in the power of great men to conquer, and ultimately extinguish, it.
Wells’s vision was impressive—his prediction of three multinational “coalescences” by the year 2000 anticipated Orwell’s Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia—but his conviction that the greatest obstacle to progress was overpopulation led him badly astray in his final chapter, which reads appallingly like a collaboration between Malthus, Ostrog and the Artilleryman. His solution to the problem of “inferior” people, whom he termed “the people of the Abyss,” is matter-of-factly genocidal: “Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.” The idea that the New Republic would “have an ideal that will make killing worth the while” drew sharp criticism from readers including G. K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wells went to great lengths to make amends in his later designs for the future. Still, to Wells, humanity was always a mess that needed tidying up.
Despite its disturbing conclusion, Anticipations was a remarkable success when it was published in 1901. Suddenly, Britain thought as highly of H. G. Wells’s intellect as he did. When the novelist and critic Arnold Bennett, one of his closest friends, wrote to say that he must be either “one of the most remarkable men alive” or a superb confidence man, Wells replied: “There is no illusion. I am great.” The book transformed him from a popular novelist into a respected public intellectual, and became his passport to the great and good. He joined both the Fabian Society and the Coefficients, an informal brains trust of politicians and philosophers. Beatrice Webb, a leading member of both groups, found this new arrival both exasperating and refreshing in his determination to throw aside orthodox thinking and become “an explorer of a new world.”
While Anticipations established Wells as a prophet, it kneecapped him as a writer of scientific romances. On a mission to propagandise for a better world, he lost the pungent ambivalence that made his early stories so compelling and became increasingly pedagogic and emotionally chilly. Over the next decade or so, he tried out various fantastical routes to utopia in The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air and The World Set Free, which predicted atomic bombs thirty-two years before the fact.“Heaven defend us from his Utopias!” cried The Nation’s reviewer. “But we like his explosions.”
Wells was proudest of A Modern Utopia, in which two men hiking in the Alps stumble into a parallel-universe Earth ruled by the Samurai, a puritanical caste of “voluntary noblemen.” On one level, the book was a running argument with everyone from More and Bacon to Bellamy and Morris, ribbing their “imaginary laws to fit incredible people.” Wells attempted to reintroduce liberty, individuality, privacy and fun to a genre known for its “strange and inhuman” perfection, and to replace tedious serenity with dynamic change: a “kinetic” utopia rather than a “static” one. It was also an advance on Anticipations, introducing equality of sexes and races, and milder forms of population control. Wells’s pleasantly efficient parallel Earth, “like a well-oiled engine beside a scrap heap,” is not a perfect world, just a better one. “There will be many Utopias,” he concludes. “Each generation will have its new version of Utopia, a little more certain and complete and real.”
As a teenager, Orwell was entranced by A Modern Utopia, but you would never guess that from his later writing about Wells. “We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish,” he wrote in 1943. “But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive.” Hitler, he thought, was proof of that. Instead of peace and pleasure, the Führer promised the German people “struggle, danger and death,” and they drank it up.
Some of Wells’s contemporaries grew frustrated with his utopias, too. Joseph Conrad fell out with him around this time, saying, “The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!” Clement Attlee named Wells as the archetypal scientific reformer whose “besetting sin . . . is his failure to make allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the individual.”
E. M. Forster, meanwhile, was moved to respond in the form of a short story. In 1909, between A Room With a View an
d Howards End, Forster published “The Machine Stops,” an enduringly brilliant “counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells.” The twentieth century filled him with dread, he wrote in his diary: “Science, instead of freeing man . . . is enslaving him to machines . . . God what a prospect! The little houses that I am used to will be swept away, the fields will stink of petrol, and the airships will shatter the stars.”
A complete novice in science fiction, Forster pilfered most of his futuristic ideas from books like A Modern Utopia, When the Sleeper Wakes and The First Men in the Moon, turning Wells’s imagination against him. The citizens of Forster’s subterranean future state live in a hi-tech cocoon where everything they need—light, air, food, water, music, company—is delivered by the holy Machine. Reduced to weak, pasty lumps by inactivity, they can deliver lectures and speak to their “several thousand” friends around the world via video: a premonition of YouTube, Skype and Facebook. Some airships remain in service, but few bother to use them because the Machine has made everywhere the same: “What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?” The more powerful the Machine becomes, the more people rely on it; the more they rely on it, the more powerful it becomes. Technology itself is the tyrant. “Progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.”
Finally, mysteriously, the Machine begins to fail, but the people are too enslaved to protest. They tolerate the stinking bathwater and rotting artificial fruit until the terminal day when civilisation collapses. Forster’s fable about addiction to technology includes one strikingly proto-Orwellian idea. In a society where “terrestrial facts” are anathema, history is endlessly rewritten until perfection is achieved by the “absolutely colourless” generation “which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened had it taken place in the days of the Machine.”
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