H.G. Wells

Born Herbert George Wells on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, the youngest son of Joseph Wells, a shopkeeper and professional cricketer of modest means, and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant. A defining accident in 1874, a broken leg that left the seven-year-old bedridden for weeks, gave him access to books, and he never looked back. His family's poverty meant an interrupted education: he was apprenticed to a draper, then a chemist, before winning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great champion. Huxley's rigorous scientific thinking shaped everything Wells wrote. Between 1895 and 1901 he produced, in an astonishing burst of invention, the novels that founded modern science fiction: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). Each used a fantastical premise to explore social and philosophical questions, class, evolution, imperialism, human nature, with a vividness that made him one of the most popular writers in the world. He then pivoted to comic realist novels of lower-middle-class life: Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) are among the finest. His Outline of History (1920) was a massive bestseller. Wells was also a tireless polemicist, socialist, and advocate for world government; his treatise The Rights of Man (1940) helped lay the groundwork for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His later years were shadowed by pessimism; Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) depicts humanity rejected by nature itself. He died in London on August 13, 1946, at seventy-nine.

His brother Frank supplied the spark. Walking together through the Surrey countryside near Woking, Frank wondered aloud what would happen if beings from another planet dropped out of the sky and began laying about them. Wells took bicycle rides through the same lanes, marking down which houses and hills his Martians would destroy.