Known as the 'father of science fiction' along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Herbert George Wells or HG Wells, passed away on 13 August 1946. A futurist in his beliefs, HG Wells' gamut of creations had a number of utopian works that foresaw advent of aircrafts, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and even the internet. While some of his early novels were scientific romances, Wells also wrote realistic works and had penned dozens of short stories and novellas, including, "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid", which helped bring the full impact of Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public.
He also wrote dozens of short stories and novellas, including the famed, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, which helped bring Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public.
Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park, London. Notably, in his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You damned fools".
On the author's 73rd death anniversary, here's looking at a few works by the acclaimed HG Wells.
The Time Machine (1895): The novel, which was written as a frame narrative, popularised the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. Notably, Wells had coined the term 'time machine'.
The Invisible Man (1897): The science fiction novel by Wells is about Griffin, a scientist who devoted himself to research into optics and invented a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible. While he successfully carried out the procedure on himself, he failed to reverse it. The book became a horror fiction classic over the years.
The First Men in the Moon (1901): The novel tells the story of a journey to the Moon undertaken by the two protagonists, a businessman narrator, Mr. Bedford, and an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor. The two discover that the Moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures called "Selenites".
Anticipations (1901): The non-fiction work saw Wells telling readers they were living through a reorganization of human society that would alter every dimension of life, based on the 'mechanical revolution' of the time. The full title of the book is Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, and was a bestseller when it released.
A Modern Utopia (19905): The novel sees two travelers falling into a space-warp, who suddenly find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. The novel is best known for forwarding the notion that a voluntary order of nobility known as the Samurai could effectively rule the world to solve the problem of combining progression with political stability.
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