H. Wells - Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, in the heyday of Queen Victoria’s reign, and died at nearly eighty, just after the end of the Second World War. Like most of us, he experienced what is often dismissed as a science fictional invention: existence in incompatibly different worlds, time-travel to an unknown planet.

For the last couple of centuries, people who live more than thirty years or so have been likely to realize, suddenly or gradually, that they are strangers in a changed, incomprehensible world: lands of exile for refugees, cities of ruin for those whose nation suffers war, a labyrinth of high technology in which the untrained mind strays bewildered, a world of huge wealth which the poor stare at through the impenetrable glass of a shop window or a TV set…. From the early nineteenth century on, the stable, single worlds of pre-industrial societies were broken down and drawn into a multiverse of constantly increasing variety and change.

Caught in those transformations, H. G. Wells wrote about them all his life.

He was no passive observer. He worked long and hard to change his world—in the first place, to get himself into a better situation in it. He was born into the servant class in a rigidly hierarchical society, his father a gardener, his mother a personal maid at Uppark, a country house of the gentry. The bright, ambitious boy got himself out of that (but always looked back with love at the lovely rural England of his childhood). He got himself out of apprenticeship to a cloth seller (where he learned a great deal about the lower middle class), and back into school—education, the road up. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, where he studied biology under Thomas Huxley and others, and the new universe of science opened out to him along with the social and intellectual realms of professional status. Injury and illness led him from teaching to writing. By his mid-thirties he was an increasingly successful and respected author, building himself a fine new house—a world away from the servants’ quarters at Uppark.

He was ambitious also to improve the world for other people. He became a socialist and briefly a member of the theoretical Socialist group, the Fabian Society, which wasn’t activist enough for him; a utopian futurist; a feminist—up to a point; a critic of society, of injustice, of capitalist commercialism; an unsuccessful Labour candidate; a tireless prophet both of cataclysm and of social betterment. In his late seventies, writing Mind at the End of Its Tether, after all the struggles and both the wars, after sticking it out in London through the bombing, he was still looking for hope for mankind, though he could find it only in the idea of a new humanity, a changed, improved species: “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.”

Trained as a biologist under a very great teacher, he never wavered in his acceptance of Darwin’s dynamic view of existence: life understood not as a Social Darwinist struggle for mere domination, not as a Christian Darwinist ascent to humanity as a final goal, but life as evolution: necessary and unceasing change. What stays fixed, dies. What adapts, goes on. The more flexibly it adapts, the farther it goes. Openness is all. Change can be brainless and brutal or intelligent and constructive. Morality enters the system only with the thinking, choosing mind. Wells imagined both dark and bright futures because his creed allowed both while promising neither, and because the eighty years of his life were years of immense intellectual and technological accomplishment and appalling violence and destruction.

In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries, Wells’s realistic novels established his importance as a writer. Idea-centered, observant of social class and stress, topical, provocative, often satirical, sometimes passionately indignant, books such as Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay are comparable to Bernard Shaw’s plays, though they haven’t worn quite as well. Wells was a quirky, sometimes heavy-handed novelist, and most of his novels, though entertaining and in flashes brilliant, have dated. What has lasted, beyond any expectation of his own and in defiance of all the snobberies of academia, are his “scientific romances”—novellas and short stories of fantasy and science fiction.

They were written before the realistic works, most of them before he was forty. His early reputation was founded on them. Later on he was rather dismissive of them, partly no doubt because it galls an artist to hear people forever talk about work done decades ago, partly because he was a demanding self-critic and knew a good many of his early stories were potboilers. Moreover, the modern critical canon excluded all nonrealistic fiction as inherently inferior, and Wells was a self-made man, competitive, edgy about aspersions of inferiority. Possibly he convinced himself that imaginative fiction is less powerful or useful than the fiction of social observation. His training after all was in science, not in art, and scientists are taught to put observation first. But his calling was art, not science, and his nature was that of a visionary, a seer of the unseen, the unobservable. He could never be satisfied by the world as we see it, as it is. He had to change it, reinvent it, or dream a new one.

The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau— these are what the name H. G. Wells means to most of us now. And rightly so. These short novels established whole genres. They left a set of indelibly vivid images, imageries, archetypes in the minds of generations of readers—and filmmakers, graphic artists, comic book devotees, TV sci-fi fans, pop cultists, and Po-Mo pundits. Introducing the recent Modern Library edition of The Time Machine, I wrote, “Nobody can write science fiction, or discuss science fiction as literature, without having read them; they are fundamental in a way even Verne is not, though Mary Shelley is. They established certain mythical tendencies in our fiction, which we have explored ever since.”

Wells wrote science fiction long before it had a name. He called it “scientific romance,” and later “fantasy of possibility”—better names, perhaps, than the one it’s stuck with. His originality and inventiveness were astonishing. Whatever kind of science fiction you look at, you’re likely to find an example of it—a first example of it—among his tales. He didn’t distinguish between science fiction and fantasy because nobody did then or for years to come; but he invented a literature, because he was the first man to write fiction as a scientist. His imagination was formed and informed by the study of biology, a science in its bright dawn of discovery and expansion, and he brought that sense of limitless possibility, both playful and fearful, to his speculations and explorations of other worlds where the mind alone can go.

And then he turned to social commentary, political exhortation, and programmatic utopias, and stopped writing short stories. Almost all the stories in this volume were written and published in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, before the First World War—many of them before the death of Queen Victoria. Enough to make one reconsider the meaning of the word “Victorian.”

Some students of science fiction insist that its particular quality depends on its ideas alone, so that attention to literary considerations apart from clarity and narrative drive, or to character as opposed to stereotype, merely weakens or dilutes it. There are memorable stories to support this view, and Wells wrote several of them. His interest in society and psychology and his high literary standards, however, led him away from such a narrow focus on idea-driven plot.