H. G. Wells  

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"The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. And what is also of very great importance in this uncertain world where destruction becomes continually more frequent and unpredictable, is this, that photography affords now every facility for multiplying duplicates of this —which we may call?—this new all-human cerebrum. It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba."--World Brain (1938) by H. G. Wells


"Homo Sapiens in his present form is played out [...] Mankind, which began in a cave and behind a windbreak, will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum." --"Mind at the End of Its Tether" (1945) by H. G. Wells

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H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946) was an English writer perhaps best-known today for his novel The War of the Worlds (1898), which caused a panic when it was adapted for radio by Orson Welles.

Contents

Overview

A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction".

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption – dubbed “Wells's law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!" (Conrad addressing Wells in a letter of 4 December 1898). His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907).

Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also an outspoken Socialist from a young age, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.


Novels

Non-fiction

Collections of articles
Autobiographies
Biographies
Essays
History
Politics
Science
Sociology
  • Great Thoughts From H. G. Wells (1912)
  • Thoughts From H. G. Wells (1912)
  • Divorce as I See It (1930)
  • The Anatomy of Frustration (1936)
  • The Fate of Homo Sapiens (a.k.a. The Fate of Man) (1939)
  • The Outlook for Homo Sapiens (1942)
  • The Conquest of Time (1942)
  • '42 to '44: A Contemporary Memoir (1944)
  • Reshaping Man's Heritage (1944) – with J. B. S. Haldane, Julian S. Huxley
  • The Happy Turning (1945)
  • Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945)
Others

Stories

  • "A Family Elopement" (1884)
  • "A Tale of the Twentieth Century" (1887)
  • "A Talk with Gryllotalpa" (1887) – published under the pseudonym Septimus Browne
  • "A Vision of the Past" (1887)
  • "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888)
  • "The Devotee of Art" (1888)
  • "The Flying Man" (aka "The Advent of the Flying Man") (1893)
  • "Æpyornis Island" (1894)
  • "A Deal in Ostriches" (1894)
  • "The Diamond Maker" (1894)
  • "The Final Men" (1894)
  • "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid" (aka "The Strange Orchid") (1894)
  • "The Hammerpond Park Burglary" (1894)
  • "The Lord of the Dynamos" (1894)
  • "How Gabriel Became Thompson" (1894)
  • "In the Avu Observatory" (1894)
  • "In the Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story" (aka "A Bardlet's Romance") (1894)
  • "The Jilting of Jane" (1894)
  • "The Lord of the Dynamos" (1894)
  • "The Man With a Nose" (1894)
  • "A Misunderstood Artist" (1894)
  • "Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation" (1894)
  • "The Stolen Bacillus" (1894)
  • "The Thing in No. 7" (1894)
  • "Through a Window" (aka "At a Window") (1894)
  • "The Thumbmark" (1894)
  • "The Treasure in the Forest" (1894)
  • "The Triumphs of a Taxidermist" (1894)
  • "The Argonauts of the Air" (1895)
  • "A Catastrophe" (1895)
  • "The Cone" (1895)
  • "How Pingwell Was Routed" (1895)
  • "Le Mari Terrible" (1895)
  • "The Moth" (aka "A Moth – Genus Novo") (1895)
  • "Our Little Neighbour" (1895)
  • "Pollock and the Porroh Man" (1895)
  • "The Reconciliation" (aka "The Bulla") (1895)
  • "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes" (aka "The Story of Davidson's Eyes") (1895)
  • "The Temptation of Harringay" (1895)
  • "Wayde's Essence" (1895)
  • "The Apple" (1896)
  • "In the Abyss" (1896)
  • "The Plattner Story" (1896)
  • "The Purple Pileus" (1896)
  • "The Rajah's Treasure" (1896)
  • "The Red Room" (1896)
  • "The Sea Raiders" (1896)
  • "A Slip Under the Microscope" (1896)
  • "The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham" (1896)
  • "Under the Knife" (aka "Slip Under the Knife") (1896)
  • "The Crystal Egg" (1897)
  • "Le Mari Terrible" (1897)
  • "The Ghost of Fear" (1897)
  • "The Lost Inheritance" (1897)
  • "Mr Marshall's Doppelganger" (1897)
  • "A Perfect Gentleman on Wheels" (1897)
  • "The Presence by the Fire" (1897)
  • "The Star" (1897)
  • "A Story of the Days To Come" (1897)
  • "A Story of the Stone Age" (aka "Stories of the Stone Age") (1897)
  • "Jimmy Goggles the God" (1898)
  • "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" (1898)
  • "Miss Winchelsea's Heart" (1898)
  • "Mr. Leadbetter's Vacation" (1898)
  • "The Stolen Body" (1898)
  • "Walcote" (1898)
  • "Mr Brisher's Treasure" (1899)
  • "A Vision of Judgment" (1899)
  • "A Dream of Armageddon" (1901)
  • "Filmer" (1901)
  • "Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland" (1901)
  • "The New Accelerator" (1901)
  • "The Inexperienced Ghost" (aka "The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost") (1902)
  • "The Loyalty of Esau Common" (1902)
  • "The Land Ironclads" (1903)
  • "Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland" (1903)
  • "The Magic Shop" (1903)
  • "The Truth About Pyecraft" (1903)
  • "The Valley of the Spiders" (1903)
  • "The Country of the Blind" (1904)
  • "The Empire of the Ants" (1905)
  • "The Door in the Wall" (1906)
  • "The Beautiful Suit" (aka "A Moonlight Fable") (1909)
  • "Little Mother Up the Morderberg" (1910)
  • "My First Aeroplane" (1910)
  • "The Obliterated Man" (1911)
  • "The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic" (1915)
  • "The Story of the Last Trump" (1915)
  • "The Wild Asses of the Devil" (1915)
  • "Peter Learns Arithmetic" (1918)
  • "The Grisly Folk" (1921)
  • "The Pearl of Love" (1924)
  • "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper" (1932)
  • "Answer to Prayer" (1937)
  • "The Country of the Blind (revised)" (1939)

Story collections

  • The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895)
  • Select Conversations With an Uncle (now extinct) (1895)
  • The Red Room (1896)
  • Thirty Strange Stories (1897)
  • The Plattner Story and Others (1897)
  • Tales of Space and Time (1899)
  • A Cure For Love (1899)
  • Twelve Stories and a Dream (1903)*
  • The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911)
  • The Door in the Wall and Other Stories (1911)
  • The Star (1913)
  • Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (1915) – first edition published under the pseudonym Reginald Bliss
  • Tales of the Unexpected (1922)
  • Tales of Wonder (1923)
  • Tales of Life and Adventure (1923)
  • The Empire of the Ants and Other Stories (1925)
  • The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927)
  • Selected Short Stories (1927)
  • The Adventures of Tommy (1929)
  • The Valley of Spiders (1930)
  • The Stolen Body and Other Tales of the Unexpected (1931)
  • The Famous Short Stories of H. G. Wells (aka The Favorite Short Stories of H. G. Wells) (1937)
  • Short Stories by H. G. Wells (1940)
  • The Inexperienced Ghost (1943)
  • The Land Ironclads (1943)
  • The New Accelerator (1943)
  • The Truth About Pyecraft and Other Short Stories (1943)
  • Twenty-Eight Science Fiction Stories (1952)
  • Seven Stories (1953)
  • Three Prophetic Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells (1960)
  • The Cone (1965)
  • Best Science Fiction Stories of H. G. Wells (1966)
  • The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1966)
  • The Man with the Nose and Other Uncollected Stories of H. G. Wells (1984)
  • The Red Room and Other Stories (1998)
  • Selected Stories of H. G. Wells (2004)

Film stories

Published versions of film scripts and scenarios written by Wells

  • The King Who Was a King: The Book of a Film (1929 - scenario for a film which was never made)
  • Things to Come (1935 - adaptation of The Shape of Things to Come and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind)
  • The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936)
  • The New Faust (in Nash's Pall Magazine, December 1936 - adaptation of "The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham")

Articles

  • "Zoological Retrogression" (1891)
  • "The Rediscovery of the Unique" (1891)
  • "Ancient Experiments in Co-Operation" (1892)
  • "On Extinction" (1893)
  • "The Man of the Year Million" (1893)
  • "The Sun God and the Holy Stars" (1894)
  • "Province of Pain" (1894)
  • "Life in the Abyss" (1894)
  • "Another Basis for Life" (1894)
  • "The Rate of Change in Species" (1894)
  • "The Biological Problem of To-day" (1894)
  • "The 'Cyclic' Delusion" (1894)
  • "Flat Earth Again" (1894)
  • "Bio-Optimism" (1895)
  • "Bye-Products in Evolution" (1895)
  • "Death" (1895)
  • "The Duration of Life" (1895)
  • "The Visibility of Change in the Moon" (1895)
  • "The Limits of Individual Plasticity" (1895)
  • "Human Evolution, an Artificial Process" (1896)
  • "Intelligence on Mars" (1896)
  • "Concerning Skeletons" (1896)
  • "The Possible Individuality of Atoms" (1896)
  • "Morals and Civilisation" (1897)
  • "On Comparative Theology" (1898)
  • "The Discovery of the Future" (1902)
  • "The Grisly Folk" (1921)
  • "Mr. Wells and Mr. Vowles" (1926)
  • "The Red Dust a Fact!" (1927)
  • "Democracy Under Revision" (1927)
  • "Wells Speaks Some Plain Words to us," New York Times, October 16, 1927
  • "Common Sense of World Peace" (1929)
  • "Foretelling the Future" (1938)





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