H.G. Wells Day: The Other Father of Science Fiction

The Other Father of Science Fiction

Herbert George Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in England. Along with Jules Verne, he’s credited as a father of science fiction, but the two men founded very different traditions, and understanding the difference explains most of the genre that followed.

In a handful of years at the end of the 1800s, Wells produced an astonishing run of books that invented whole categories of science fiction. The Time Machine in 1895 gave us time travel as we know it. The War of the Worlds gave us the alien invasion. The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau gave us the science-gone-wrong horror story. Nearly every one of these has been filmed and refilmed and imitated for over a century.

He didn’t just write early science fiction, he laid down the master templates that the genre is still working from. (See also his 1897 catastrophe story The Star)

Where Verne was the engineer, obsessed with how the submarine or the rocket functioned, Wells was the social thinker. He used the impossible as a lens to examine humanity. The time machine was an excuse to look at class division stretched across deep time. The Martian invasion was a mirror held up to colonialism. Wells cared less about the mechanism and more about what it revealed about us. That’s the other half of science fiction, the speculative “what if” that uses the strange to interrogate the real.

Why I Reimagined The Time Machine

The Time Machine is one of my favorites, and I loved it enough to reimagine it, because for all its brilliance, Wells left something out.

Wells’s original is a novel of ideas. His Time Traveler builds the machine almost as an intellectual exercise and uses it to observe the far future, the gentle Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks, as a kind of grim lesson about where society is heading. It’s dazzling and it’s cold. The machine is a thought experiment, and the man driving it barely has an inner life.

So in my version, I gave him the reason Wells never did.

My Victorian scientist builds the time machine because his wife is dying of smallpox, and he believes the future holds a cure. He goes forward, and he finds it. And then he keeps going, further and further, because he can’t bring himself to face the moment he has to return to. The same machine, the same future, but now driven by grief instead of curiosity. That changes everything about what the story means.

I didn’t do that because Wells was wrong. I did it because the bones of his story were strong enough to carry a different kind of weight. He built a machine for exploring ideas. I wanted to know what it would feel like to climb into that machine as a desperate, heartbroken man, running from a loss instead of toward an experiment. The best old stories leave room like that, a hollow space the original author never filled, waiting for someone to climb inside.

The Prophet Who Saw the Dark

Wells was a real prophet, and unlike a lot of early science fiction, much of what he foresaw was grim.

He wrote about aerial bombardment of cities before airplanes were used in war. He described something very like the atomic bomb, and even used the phrase “atomic bomb,” decades before it existed. He imagined tanks, genetic engineering, and global catastrophe. He wasn’t a cheerful futurist promising shiny rockets. He understood that the same science that could save us could also destroy us, and he wrote that warning again and again. That darker, more cautionary strain runs straight through modern science fiction, from dystopias to every story about technology turning on its makers.

It is, too, that science fiction was only one part of what Wells did.

He was among the most prominent public intellectuals of his age, a prolific writer of essays, social criticism, and history. His Outline of History was a massive bestseller that tried to tell the whole human story in one sweep. He argued about politics, education, and the future of society for decades.

The science fiction we remember him for was the early, dazzling edge of a much larger career spent thinking hard about where humanity was going. That breadth is part of why his speculative stories carry so much weight. They came from a mind obsessed with the real future.

What does H.G. Wells teach writers?

Wells offers lessons that Verne and the hard-science writers cannot.

The first is that the impossible thing is never the point. In Wells, the time machine, the Martians, the invisibility serum are all just devices for asking a human question. The science fiction element is a tool. If your story is only about the cool technology, it won’t last. If the technology is a way to examine people, it can become permanent.

The second is the power of a clean premise. Wells could state an entire novel in one sentence. A man travels to the far future. Martians invade Earth. A man becomes invisible. That clarity is part of why these stories spread across the whole world and never stopped. A premise simple enough to say in a breath and rich enough to explore for a lifetime is the holy grail, and Wells found it over and over.

The third is the one my Time Machine is built on. A great story is never finished. The strongest premises are generous enough that later writers can enter them and find what the original left out, the missing emotion, the unexplored character, the human reason underneath the idea. Reimagining Wells is proof that what he built was big enough to live in.

So on September 21, read some Wells, or watch one of the dozens of films born from his books. Then ask what your favorite cold, brilliant story is missing, and whether you’re the one to climb inside and warm it up.

H.G. Wells Day FAQ