Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books. Together with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Wells has been referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction".Wells was an outspoken socialist and sympathetic to pacifist views, although he supported the First World War once it was under way, and his later works became increasingly political and didactic. His middle-period novels (1900–1920) were less science-fictional; they covered lower-middle class life (The History of Mr Polly) and the "New Woman" and the Suffragettes (Ann Veronica).

As one method of self-expression, Wells tended to sketch a lot. One common location for these sketches was the endpapers and title pages of his own diaries, and they covered a wide variety of topics, from political commentary to his feelings toward his literary contemporaries and his current romantic interests. During his marriage to Amy Catherine, whom he nicknamed Jane, he sketched a considerable number of pictures, many of them being overt comments on their marriage. It was during this period, and this period only, that he called his sketches "picshuas." These picshuas have been the topic of study by Wells scholars for many years, and recently a book was published on the subject.

H. G. Wells has been portrayed in a number of novels, films, and games, including:
The novel The Time Ships, by British author Stephen Baxter, was designated by the Wells estate as an authorised sequel to The Time Machine, marking the centenary of its publication, and features characters, situations and technobabble from several of Wells's stories, as well as a representation of Wells (unnamed, and referred to as 'my friend, the Author').
Christopher Priest's novel The Space Machine thematically references both The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
The first volume of the graphic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill features cavorite, the fictional substance from Well's The First Men in the Moon. In addition the second volume includes Wells's character Doctor Moreau.
In C. S. Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength, the character Jules is a caricature of Wells,[50] and much of Lewis's science fiction was written both under the influence of Wells and as an antithesis to his work (or, as he put it, an "exorcism"[51] of the influence it had on him). The devoutly Christian Lewis was especially incensed at Wells's The Shape of Things to Come where a future world government systematically persecutes and completely obliterates Christianity (and all other religions), which the book presents as a positive and vitally necessary act. (Lewis had, however, kind words to say for Wells as an author; in a note at the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet, he writes, "Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic purposes. The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H. G. Wells's fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them.")
Wells's photo appears on a stairway wall of time traveller Alex Hartdegen's New York brownstone, in a 2002 version of The Time Machine, directed by Wells's great-grandson Simon Wells. The 1960 movie version has a plate on the Time Machine telling that it had been manufactured by "H. George Wells" (a.k.a. George, the protagonist of the film).
Arthur Sammler, the main character of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, knew Wells, and is urged by other characters to use that fact as the basis for writing a biography of Wells, a project about which Holocaust survivor and self-made philosopher Sammler has decidedly mixed feelings.
Wells appears as the protagonist in the 1979 film Time After Time, and in the novel The Martian War by Kevin J. Anderson (as "Gabriel Mesta"). Both works use the conceit that Wells's works were based upon actual adventures he had. In the film Time After Time, he meets and falls in love with a woman named Amy Robbins (the name of his real-life second wife).
In an episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, titled Tempus Fugitive, a time-travelling H. G. Wells (Terry Kiser) seeks out Superman's help to stop a criminal from the future whom Wells had accidentally unleashed on the present. The concept of Wells's time machine being stolen and used for evil closely resembles the plot of Time After Time. Both H. G. Wells and the criminal Tempus (Lane Davies) returned for three later episodes.
In an adventure in the BBC's Doctor Who, the two-part, 90-minute "Timelash", the time-travelling Doctor (Colin Baker) encounters an excitable young man, Herbert, in the Scottish Highlands, taking him on an adventure that is revealed to have been inspirational when it is finally realised this is the pre-published Wells.
In Ben Bova's short story "Inspiration", the narrator gets Wells to meet a young Albert Einstein and Lord Kelvin. In the end of the story he (Wells) gave a tip to a 6-year-old Adolf Hitler.
The movie Librarian:Quest for The Spear, ends with the main character, Flynn Carsen, getting a mission to retrieve H. G. Wells's Time Machine.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and staunch Republican, praised Wells in his book To Renew America, writing "Our generation is still seeking its Jules Verne or H. G. Wells to dazzle our imaginations with hope and optimism".[52]
In the movie The Maltese Falcon Kasper Gutman recounts the history of the bird emphasising that "Those are facts, historical facts, not school book history, not Mr. Wells' history, but facts nevertheless."
In the science/historical fiction novel And Having Writ..., Wells is a major character.
Wells is a major character in John Kessel's award-winning short story "Buffalo", first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February, 1991.[53]
Wells makes an appearance in the Stargate SG-1 book Roswell.
H. G. Wells makes an appearance in Chapter 10 of The Hollow Lands by Michael Moorcock. This being the second book in The Dancers at the End of Time series. The hero has gone back in time and needs help returning to the future.
Woody Allen's comedy film Sleeper (1973) is loosely based on Wells's novel, When the Sleeper Awakes.
The Infinite Worlds of H. G. Wells is a 4hr dramatisation of the origin of several of Wells's stories. Originally made for TV, the series has been released on DVD.
In Libba Bray's novel The Sweet Far Thing, H. G. Wells makes an appearance in chapter twenty-four.
Ronald Wright's 1998 novel A Scientific Romance imagines that a Wells contemporary built a working time machine, which the protagonist uses to travel 500 years into the future, where he explores England which has become overgrown with jungle, and the few remaining people live in stone age conditions with peculiar remnants of civilisation.
In the popular webcomic Irregular Webcomic! H. G. Wells is described as being a time traveller.
In the TV series Lost Sawyer refers to Daniel as H. G. Wells.[54]
In Animaniacs Pinky & the Brain segment episode, When Mice Ruled the Earth, H. G. Wells invents the time machine but does not believe it works. Pinky and the Brain use it to change the past to make mice the ruling species, hoping they'd accept Brain as their leader. However, when the mice of the new timeline turn out to be Pinky-like, Brain decides to turn everything back to normal as, when Pinky comments how easy would it be to rule that world, he wonders who would want it.
2009 game Prototype pays homage to Wells by naming many of its missions after his works, including The Wheels of Chance, Open Conspiracy, Under the Knife, The Stolen Body, The Door in the Wall, First and Last Things, Men Like Gods, A Dream of Armageddon, The World Set Free, Things to Come.
A teenaged H. G. Wells is one of the heroes with a similarly youthful G. K. Chesterton in The Young Chesterton Chronicles, Volume I: The Tripods Attack!, a science fiction/alternative history adventure series, written by John McNichol.
An elderly H. G. Wells appears as a character in the online serial Solar Pons's War of the Worlds, in which he aids Solar Pons in a Martian invasion in 1938.[55]
In the Second Volume of the Bookworm Adventures, H.G. Wells is one of the companions that helps Lex in battles.
A time travelling Wells is a major character in James A Owen's fantasy series the chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica
The main characters in Disney's Phil of the Future attended H.G. Wells Jr/Sr High School. This was a reference to the fact that the main character was a time traveler from the future who was stuck in the present.
H.G. Wells appears as an anti-hero in the second season of the science fiction series Warehouse 13.[56] In the show, Wells is portrayed as being female--a sister to the man who was the public persona--with the first name Helena.



Wells's first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901).When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of population from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, and averred that "my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea").


His early novels, called "scientific romances", invented a number of themes now classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon. He also wrote other, non-fantastic novels that have received critical acclaim including Kipps and the satire on Edwardian advertising, Tono-Bungay.
Wells wrote several dozen short stories and novellas, the best known of which is "The Country of the Blind" (1904). His short story "The New Accelerator" was the inspiration for the Star Trek episode Wink of an Eye.
Though Tono-Bungay was not a science-fiction novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in it. Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in The World Set Free (1914). This book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic "hit." Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosive—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century," he wrote, "than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands." Leó Szilárd acknowledged that the book inspired him to theorise the nuclear chain reaction.
Wells also wrote nonfiction. His bestselling three-volume work, The Outline of History (1920), began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians.Many other authors followed with 'Outlines' of their own in other subjects. Wells reprised his Outline in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the World,and two long efforts, The Science of Life (1930) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931). The 'Outlines' became sufficiently common for James Thurber to parody the trend in his humorous essay, "An Outline of Scientists"—indeed, Wells's Outline of History remains in print with a new 2005 edition, while A Short History of the World has been recently reedited (2006).
From quite early in his career, he sought a better way to organise society, and wrote a number of Utopian novels. The first of these was A Modern Utopia (1905), which shows a worldwide utopia with "no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all";two travellers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realise a better way of living: whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally and abandoning a European war (In the Days of the Comet (1906)), or a world council of scientists taking over, as in The Shape of Things to Come (1933, which he later adapted for the 1936 Alexander Korda film, Things to Come). This depicted, all too accurately, the impending World War, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs. He also portrayed the rise of fascist dictators in The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930) and The Holy Terror (1939), though in the former novel, the tale is revealed at the end to have been Mr Parham's dream vision.


Wells contemplates the ideas of nature versus nurture and questions humanity in books such as The Island of Doctor Moreau. Not all his scientific romances ended in a happy Utopia, and in fact, Wells also wrote the first dystopia novel, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. The Island of Doctor Moreau is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting back to their animal natures.

Wells also wrote the preface for the first edition of W. N. P. Barbellion's diaries, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, published in 1919. Since "Barbellion" was the real author's pen name, many reviewers believed Wells to have been the true author of the Journal; Wells always denied this, despite being full of praise for the diaries, but the rumours persisted until Barbellion's death later that year.
In 1927, Florence Deeks sued Wells for infringement of copyright, claiming that he had stolen much of the content of The Outline of History from a work, The Web, she had submitted to the Canadian Macmillan Company, but who held onto the manuscript for eight months before rejecting it. Despite numerous similarities in phrasing and factual errors, the court found the evidence inadequate and dismissed the case. A Privy Council report added that, as Deek's work had not been printed, there were no legal grounds at all for the action.

In 1933 Wells predicted in The Shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin January 1940,a prediction which ultimately came true just four months early, when the Second World War broke out in September 1939.

In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopedia, to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being. In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, World Brain, including the essay, "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia."

Near the end of the Second World War, Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists of people slated for immediate arrest during the invasion of Britain in the abandoned Operation Sea Lion, and Wells was included in the alphabetical list on the same page of "The Black Book" as Rebecca West.Wells, as president of the International PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), had already angered the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German PEN club from the international body in 1934 following the German PEN's refusal to admit non-Aryan writers to its membership.

Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells also wrote Floor Games (1911) followed by Little Wars (1913). Little Wars is recognised today as the first recreational wargame and Wells is regarded by gamers and hobbyists as "the Father of Miniature War Gaming"