Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher, most famous for his science fiction romances that variously depict alien invasion, terrifying future societies, and transformed states of being.

Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, the son of a professional cricketer and a domestic servant. By the time he was 16, he had failed in three apprenticeships to two drapers and a pharmacist. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, but, although he was a gifted student, his interest in journalism and politics led him to fail his exams in 1887. Working as a science tutor, he married his cousin, Isabel, in 1891, but left her for a student, Amy Catherine Robbins, three years later. They married in 1895, Wells arbitrarily deciding that she would henceforth be known as “Jane”.

Literary recognition came with his novella, The Time Machine (1895), which described a journey to ad 802701, when humanity has evolved into two distinct species, the child-like Eloi, and the Morlocks, brutish workers in subterranean industries. Between periods of mental breakdown, Wells produced a remarkable series of novels that used science to dramatize anxieties about human development. These included The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), in which a vivisectionist attempts to elevate animals to human status by a series of hideous medical operations. In The Invisible Man (1897), a megalomaniac scientist, John Griffin, uses invisibility to terrify a community. The War of the Worlds (1898) is a fantasy of reverse colonization, in which humanity is powerless to prevent the invasion of Earth by technologically advanced aliens. The First Men in the Moon (1901) describes an ant-like society run along strict utilitarian lines.

Between 1902 and 1906, Wells was involved with the Fabian Society, but soon quarrelled with its leaders, whom he later parodied in The New Machiavelli (1911). Beatrice Webb thought him “an interesting but unattractive personality”. Wells became increasingly fascinated by a vision of the future in which an elite of superhumans would rule the world along rational, scientific lines. A political treatise, Anticipations (1901), predicted a future shaped by eugenics, in which the reproduction of “servile types” of human would be regulated. For Wells, this included all non-white races. A Modern Utopia (1905) and The World Set Free (1914) depict similar societies, the latter describing the growth of a rationalist state in the aftermath of atomic war. Men Like Gods (1923) teleports a group of contemporary English people into this civilization, and the novel prompted Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World (1932) in protest.

Other novels dealt with less outlandish subjects, but retained an interest in social and political ideas. Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) are concerned with members of the lower-middle class and their aspirations. Tono-Bungay (1909) is a satire on Edwardian capitalism, in which a family grows rich on the sales of a harmful patent medicine. Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) dramatized the average Englishman's responses to World War I.

Wells's many extra-marital affairs impacted upon his fiction, and several of his novels argue against lifelong monogamy. A version of his relationship with the novelist Amber Reeves features in Ann Veronica (1909), in which a young woman escapes her authoritarian family to find sexual freedom. Marriage (1912) and The Passionate Friends (1913) offer similar social critiques. A critical review of the former by Rebecca West in the feminist journal, the Freewoman, led to a meeting, and subsequently to a ten-year relationship that produced a son, Anthony West, in 1914. Other partners included Elizabeth von Armin, playwright and novelist, and Moura Budberg, secretary to Maxim Gorky, whom he met on his trip to Russia in 1920. “Jane” Wells died in 1927.

Wells and a team of editors produced an internationally popular two-volume historical work, The Outline of History (1920). His later writings were increasingly pessimistic. The Shape of Things to Come (1933), published in the year that Hitler came to power, predicted global conflict in 1939. Produced at the end of World War II, his final book, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), argued that “the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded”. He died on August 13, 1946, in London.