Klim Zhukov
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, a small town in Kent, England, into a family that seemed to have little connection to the literary world.
His father was a professional cricket player who also ran a small china shop. His mother had worked as a domestic servant.
“Bertie,” as he was known at home, left school at 14 and became an apprentice to a draper — a life he would come to hate. But his fortunes eventually changed. Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied under Thomas Henry Huxley, the celebrated biologist and one of Charles Darwin’s most influential defenders.
That scientific education would become the foundation of Wells’ approach to fiction.
What if this Really Could Happen?
No matter how extraordinary the idea — a machine that travels through time, an invisible man, invaders from Mars — Wells tried to carry it just far enough for the reader to wonder: What if this really could happen?
In 1895, he published The Time Machine, the novel that made him famous and helped establish modern science fiction as a literary genre.
Then came an extraordinary run of books: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and The War in the Air (1908).
But Wells was never interested in fantastic machines or alien invasions simply for their own sake.
His science fiction was almost always about something else.
Class.
Power.
The responsibility of scientists for what they create.
The way ordinary people behave when civilization suddenly begins to collapse.
And the dangerous temptation of one person — or one group — to place themselves above everyone else.
Wells soon outgrew the label of science-fiction writer altogether. He wrote about politics, education, history and the future of humanity, arguing with his contemporaries and trying to design better societies with almost the same enthusiasm he once devoted to designing time machines and Martian fighting machines.
For Wells, science fiction was not an escape from reality.
It was a way of conducting experiments on it.
One of his most fascinating books is When the Sleeper Wakes, published in 1899 — an early dystopian novel that can feel startlingly modern today.
Its hero, Graham, falls into an extraordinary sleep and awakens 203 years later.
During those two centuries, the fortune administered in his name has grown to unimaginable proportions. Graham wakes to discover that, on paper at least, he has become the owner of much of the world.
He is known simply as the Sleeper.
But he quickly discovers that his power is largely an illusion.
The world is actually controlled by a powerful Council. Above him is a dazzling city filled with technological wonders; beneath it is a population whose labor keeps the entire system alive.
More than a century later, some of Wells’ ideas sound eerily familiar: the concentration of economic power, mass media used as a means of influence, extreme social inequality, entertainment as a tool for shaping public opinion, and the growing distance between those who appear to hold power and those who actually exercise it.
At the heart of the novel is a rebellion against the existing order.
It would be going too far to say that Wells “predicted” the revolutions of the early 20th century. But writing in 1899, he clearly sensed the social pressures building beneath the surface of the modern industrial world — pressures that would soon erupt into mass movements, revolutions and political upheaval.
If The Time Machine is a philosophical parable about the price of progress, When the Sleeper Wakes asks a more political question:
What happens when technology advances, but human freedom does not?
Progress without justice, Wells suggested, could simply produce more sophisticated forms of oppression.
It is one reason the novel can be surprisingly unsettling to read today.
But perhaps Wells’ most famous glimpse of the future appeared in another book.
In 1914, he published The World Set Free.
In it, Wells imagined weapons powered by the release of atomic energy — and called them “atomic bombs.”
Hiroshima was still 31 years away.
Wells’ fictional bombs did not work like real nuclear weapons. His description reflected the scientific understanding of his own era.
But what is remarkable is that Wells was interested not merely in the weapon itself.
He was interested in what would happen to the world after such a weapon existed.
He understood that if humanity acquired the power to destroy on an unprecedented scale, the old rules of international politics might no longer be enough.
That was less a technological prediction than a historical one.
And Wells increasingly wanted to do more than simply observe the future.
In 1934, he met U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later that year he traveled to Moscow, where, on July 23, he held a lengthy conversation with Joseph Stalin.
By then, the science-fiction novelist had become a man who sat across the table from some of the most powerful political figures on Earth.
The question that fascinated him remained essentially the same:
What kind of society would come next — and could humanity build something more rational before another catastrophe forced it to?
Yet one of Wells’ most intriguing visions of the future had nothing to do with weapons.
It was about information.
During the 1930s, Wells began developing an idea he called the “World Brain.”
He imagined a continuously updated World Encyclopedia — a vast system for collecting, checking, organizing and distributing human knowledge.
It would not have to exist in a single physical location. Information could be reproduced, updated and made available to people across the world.
In 1937, decades before computers became part of everyday life, Wells was effectively imagining a distributed system of human memory.
He did not predict the internet in any technical sense. There was no World Wide Web in his vision, no search engine and no network of digital servers.
But the underlying dream — a global information space in which knowledge could be continually updated and accessed across great distances — feels remarkably familiar today.
There is no straight technological line from Wells’ “World Brain” to Wikipedia, Google or the internet.
But there is an extraordinary intellectual resemblance.
And then there was The War of the Worlds.
One of the most famous episodes connected to Wells’ legacy happened without him at all.
On Oct. 30, 1938, Orson Welles presented a CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Martian-invasion story.
Part of the program was designed to sound like ordinary radio programming suddenly interrupted by urgent news bulletins, reports from the scene and live updates from correspondents.
The Martians had moved from H.G. Wells’ England to New Jersey.
For someone tuning in late, it could sound disturbingly like an actual breaking-news broadcast.
Some listeners did believe that something terrible was happening and called police departments, newspapers and radio stations for information.
But the famous story that America collectively panicked and poured into the streets in terror is largely a myth.
Later research showed that the program’s audience was relatively small and that most listeners understood they were hearing fiction. Newspaper coverage helped turn a limited episode of confusion into the legend of a nationwide panic.
Still, there was something strangely fitting about the story.
Forty years earlier, H.G. Wells had imagined an invasion from Mars.
Now a new form of mass media had demonstrated how easily fiction could briefly acquire the voice of reality.
Wells Lived Until 1946
By then, he had seen a world that in some ways had become more frightening than his novels.
Two world wars.
Tanks.
The mass aerial bombing of cities.
Totalitarian states.
And finally, atomic weapons.
Not everything described today as a “prediction” by H.G. Wells really was one.
Sometimes he simply followed scientific and social trends to their logical conclusions. Sometimes he was wrong. Sometimes he was simply imagining possibilities.
But that may have been his greatest talent.
Wells did not so much predict the future as see a little farther into the present than most people around him.
Wells understood that a scientific discovery does not merely change technology.
It changes society.
It changes power.
It changes war.
And, eventually, it changes us.
That is why the enduring fascination of H.G. Wells is not really about how many inventions he managed to foresee.
Behind the time machine, there was always a human being.
Behind the Martians, a human being.
Behind invisibility, a human being.
Behind the atomic bomb, a human being.
And behind every imagined society of the future, there was still a human being — with the same fears, hopes, weaknesses and stubborn desire to know where the road ahead might lead.
Perhaps that is why, 160 years after H.G. Wells was born, we are still reading him.
Not because he can tell us the future. But because he can still help us understand the present.
Michael Moore
Yuri Chekalin
Victor Aliyev
