Moscow to speak with Stalin and returns despondent over the encounter. The writer’s good-natured Experiment in Autobiography, a portrait of himself and his contemporaries, appears. He visits the United States and confers with Roosevelt.

1935 Based on the novel The Shape of Things to Come, Wells writes the screenplay for Things to Come, a film produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies.

1936 Things to Come is released in the United States.

1938 Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds sends millions of Americans into panic.

1939 World War II begins.

1945 World War II ends. Wells publishes Mind at the End of Its Tether, a vision of mankind rejected and destroyed by nature. George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears.

1946 Herbert George Wells dies in London on August 13.

Introduction

In 1895 Herbert George Wells learned to ride a bicycle. Hardly an unusual occurrence, for the twenty-nine-year-old Wells it represented a major accomplishment and a tremendous liberation. Wells had always been physically weak—his lungs hemorrhaged on more than one occasion—and he further punished his constitution by cramming for examinations in order to extricate himself from abject poverty and boring jobs with no future. The bicycle, by 1895 so popular in England that manufacturers could not keep pace with demand, revealed to Wells and countless thousands of others that using a body—even a not especially strong body—to propel a machine could free them from dependence on collective modes of transportation. People could now travel at their own speed, wherever and whenever they chose.

The bicycle is also symbolic of Wells’s solitary individuality—even later when he designed a tandem bicycle so he and his wife could ride together, he made sure he would do the steering. By becoming a writer, Wells liberated himself from family and employers, but like a bicyclist, his success depended entirely on his own efforts and willpower. If he crashed, he would have no one to blame but himself. In this sense, Wells is the ultimate expression of nineteenth-century individualism: the solitary Romantic at odds with things as they are, the visionary able to see things to which others are blind, the self-made man who owes nothing to anyone yet concerns himself with the future of all mankind.

Conscious that the industrial revolution had utterly transformed Europe, Wells became obsessed with the idea that society too could be made into a smoothly functioning, efficient, and productive machine. Aware, as relatively few were, of socialism, Wells was convinced that a new and better social order could be devised, though he did not believe in the “workers’ paradise” utopia promised by Karl Marx (1818-1883). In fact, the nightmare future of The Time Machine (1895) is Wells’s version of that Marxist utopia, a world where the former workers (the Morlocks) eat the former capitalist class (the Eloi). Wells distrusted utopias precisely because he believed they deprive humanity of goals and render it complacent and, ultimately, stupid. His solution was unremitting work, production, and competition.

Wells realized he was living in an age of transition and concluded that industrialization would invalidate traditional forms of government—from monarchy to democracy—but he was only too aware that technological advances would occur much more rapidly than would social evolution, that an undisciplined, anarchic humanity equipped with modern machines would be like a child playing with a loaded pistol. All of his writing has, then, a double focus: On the one hand, it points out the shortcomings of the current age, while on the other, it seeks to orient the present in the direction the author deems proper. So Wells is something very different from a prophet, who tells what the future will be: He is a social planner who offers a model of what it should be.

The differences between England in the late-nineteenth century—especially its last five years, when Wells produced The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Wheels of Chance (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), along with myriad short stories and journalistic essays—and England after World War I are radical. From today’s perspective, England in 1895 is an only partially modern country: There was gas for lighting, at least in municipal areas, and a rail network that connected the entire country. This meant that while Wells could get to London from Woking by train, he would still have to rely on horse-drawn carriages for local travel. This was true even in London and applied as well to the transportation of