Wells wrote forty-plus novels and coined ‘Wells’s law’
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) poured out more than forty novels and dozens of stories while preaching progressive social redesign. Joseph Conrad praised how each tale plants one wild premise among ordinary details—later dubbed Wells’s law. Biology training and youthful socialism shaped his Darwinian ethics.
Born on 21 September 1866 at Atlas House in Bromley, Kent, “Bertie” was the fourth and last child of a former gardener turned shopkeeper and a devout Protestant mother who clashed with her freethinking husband. A broken leg in 1874 confined him to bed with library books his father fetched, and reading became a passion. When money ran out he was apprenticed, miserably, to a draper from 1880 to 1883, before escaping to teach younger pupils at Midhurst Grammar School.
A scholarship then took him to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley on a guinea a week. He earned a zoology degree only in 1890, taught at Henley House School, where one pupil was A. A. Milne, and published a two-volume biology textbook in 1893. Humorous journalism for papers such as the Pall Mall Gazette paid the bills.
His private life fed the work. He married his cousin Isabel in 1891, separated in 1894 after falling for a student, Amy Catherine Robbins, and moved with her to Woking in 1895. That short spell was perhaps his most productive: The Time Machine appeared in 1895, followed by The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds by 1898, and later the social comedies Kipps and The History of Mr Polly about lower-middle-class life.
As a futurist he predicted flying machines, armoured tanks, spaceflight, atomic bombs, TV beamed from satellites and a forerunner of the World Wide Web, and his fiction explored time travel, alien invasion and biological engineering early. Brian Aldiss called him the Shakespeare of science fiction.
Source: H. G. Wells
