Hugo Gernsbacher August 16, 1884 Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
Died
August 19, 1967 (aged 83) Manhattan, New York City
Pen name
Beno Ruckshagg, Erno Shuckbagg, Grace G. Hucksnob, Grego Banshuck, Greno Gashbuck, Gus N. Habergock, Kars Gugenchob
Occupation
Inventor
magazine publisher
editor
writer
Nationality
Luxembourgish, American
Period
1911–1967 (science fiction)
Genre
Science fiction
Gernsback demonstrating his television goggles in 1963 for Life magazine
Gernsback watching a television broadcast by his station WRNY on the cover of his Radio News (Nov 1928)
Hugo Gernsback (/ˈɡɜːrnzbæk/; born Hugo Gernsbacher,
August 16, 1884 – August 19, 1967) was a Luxembourgish–American
inventor, writer, editor, and magazine publisher, best known for
publications including the first science fiction magazine. His contributions to the genre as publisher—although not as a writer—were so significant that, along with the novelists H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, he is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction". In his honour, annual awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention are named the "Hugos".
Personal life
Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg City, to Berta (Dürlacher), a housewife, and Moritz Gernsbacher, a winemaker. His family was Jewish. Gernsback emigrated to the United States in 1904 and later became a naturalized citizen.
He married three times: to Rose Harvey in 1906, Dorothy Kantrowitz in
1921, and Mary Hancher in 1951. In 1925, he founded radio station WRNY, which was broadcast from the 18th floor of the Roosevelt Hotel
in New York City. In 1928, WRNY aired some of the first television
broadcasts. During the show, audio stopped and each artist waved or
bowed onscreen. When audio resumed, they performed. Gernsback is also
considered a pioneer in amateur radio.
Before helping to create science fiction, Gernsback was an
entrepreneur in the electronics industry, importing radio parts from
Europe to the United States and helping to popularize amateur
"wireless". In April 1908 he founded Modern Electrics,
the world's first magazine about both electronics and radio, called
"wireless" at the time. While the cover of the magazine itself states it
was a catalog, most historians note that it contained articles,
features, and plotlines, qualifying it as a magazine.
Under its auspices, in January 1909, he founded the Wireless Association of America,
which had 10,000 members within a year. In 1912, Gernsback said that he
estimated 400,000 people in the U.S. were involved in amateur radio. In
1913, he founded a similar magazine, The Electrical Experimenter, which became Science and Invention
in 1920. It was in these magazines that he began including scientific
fiction stories alongside science journalism, including his novel Ralph 124C 41+, which he ran for 12 months from April 1911 in Modern Electrics.
Hugo Gernsback started the Radio News magazine for amateur radio enthusiasts in 1919.
He died at Roosevelt Hospital (Mount Sinai West as of 2020) in New York City on August 19, 1967.
Science fiction
Gernsback's second novel, Baron Münchausen's Scientific Adventures, was serialized in Amazing in 1928, with the opening installment taking the February cover.
Gernsback's
short story "The Cosmatomic Flyer", under the byline "Greno Gashbuck,"
was cover-featured in the debut issue of Gernsback's Science-Fiction Plus in 1953
Gernsback provided a forum for the modern genre of science fiction in 1926 by founding the first magazine dedicated to it, Amazing Stories.
The inaugural April issue comprised a one-page editorial and reissues
of six stories, three less than ten years old and three by Poe, Verne, and Wells. He said he became interested in the concept after reading a translation of the work of Percival Lowell as a child. His idea of a perfect science fiction story was "75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science". He also played an important role in starting science fiction fandom, by organizing the Science Fiction League
and by publishing the addresses of people who wrote letters to his
magazines. Fans began to organize, and became aware of themselves as a
movement, a social force; this was probably decisive for the subsequent
history of the genre.
Gernsback coined the term "science fiction" in 1929. His preferred term for the genre was scientifiction.
In 1929, he lost ownership of his first magazines after a bankruptcy lawsuit. There is some debate about whether this process was genuine, manipulation by publisher Bernarr Macfadden, or a Gernsback scheme to begin another company. After losing control of Amazing Stories, Gernsback founded two new science fiction magazines, Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. A year later, due to Depression-era financial troubles, the two were merged into Wonder Stories, which Gernsback continued to publish until 1936, when it was sold to Thrilling Publications and renamed Thrilling Wonder Stories. Gernsback returned in 1952–53 with Science-Fiction Plus.
Gernsback was noted for sharp (sometimes shady) business practices, and for paying his writers extremely low fees or not paying them at all. H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith referred to him as "Hugo the Rat".
Gernsback's venality and corruption, his sleaziness and
his utter disregard for the financial rights of authors, have been well
documented and discussed in critical and fan literature. That the
founder of genre science fiction who gave his name to the field's most
prestigious award and who was the Guest of Honor at the 1952 Worldcon
was pretty much a crook (and a contemptuous crook who stiffed his
writers but paid himself $100K a year as President of Gernsback
Publications) has been clearly established.
Jack Williamson,
who had to hire an attorney associated with the American Fiction Guild
to force Gernsback to pay him, summed up his importance for the genre:
At any rate, his main influence in the field was simply
to start Amazing and Wonder Stories and get SF out to the public
newsstands—and to name the genre he had earlier called "scientifiction."
Fiction
Frederik Pohl said in 1965 that Gernsback's Amazing Stories published "the kind of stories Gernsback himself used to write: a sort of animated catalogue of gadgets". Gernsback's fiction includes the novel Ralph 124C 41+; the title is a pun on the phrase "one to foresee for many" ("one plus"). Even though Ralph 124C 41+ has been described as pioneering many ideas and themes found in later SF work, it has often been neglected due to what most critics deem poor artistic quality. Author Brian Aldiss called the story a "tawdry illiterate tale" and a "sorry concoction", while author and editor Lester del Rey called it "simply dreadful." While most other modern critics have little positive to say about the story's writing, Ralph 124C 41+ is considered by science fiction critic Gary Westfahl as "essential text for all studies of science fiction."
Gernsback's second novel, Baron Münchausen's Scientific Adventures, was serialized in Amazing Stories in 1928.
Gernsback's third (and final) novel, Ultimate World,
written c. 1958, was not published until 1971. Lester del Rey described
it simply as "a bad book", marked more by routine social commentary than
by scientific insight or extrapolation. James Blish,
in a caustic review, described the novel as "incompetent, pedantic,
graceless, incredible, unpopulated and boring" and concluded that its
publication "accomplishes nothing but the placing of a blot on the
memory of a justly honored man."
Gernsback combined his fiction and science into Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine, serving as the editor in the 1930s.
Legacy
In 1954, Gernsback was awarded an Officer of Luxembourg's Order of the Oak Crown, an honor equivalent to being knighted.
The Hugo Awards or "Hugos" are the annual achievement awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention,
selected in a process that ends with vote by current Convention
members. They originated and acquired the "Hugo" nickname during the
1950s and were formally defined as a convention responsibility under the
name "Science Fiction Achievement Awards" early in the 1960s. The
nickname soon became almost universal and its use legally protected;
"Hugo Award(s)" replaced the longer name in all official uses after the
1991 cycle.
In 1960 Gernsback received a special Hugo Award as "The Father of Magazine Science Fiction".
Science fiction author Brian W. Aldiss
held a contrary view about Gernsback's contributions: "It is easy to
argue that Hugo Gernsback ... was one of the worst disasters to hit the
science fiction field ... Gernsback himself was utterly without any
literary understanding. He created dangerous precedents which many later
editors in the field followed."
The 2010 video game Mass Effect 2 contains a level involving a downed space charter that bears his name.
Influence in radio electronics and broadcasting
Gernsback made significant contributions to the growth of early
broadcasting, mostly through his efforts as a publisher. He originated
the industry of specialized publications for radio with Modern Electrics and Electrical Experimenter. Later on, and more influentially, he published Radio News, which would have the largest readership among radio magazines in radio broadcasting's formative years. He edited Radio News until 1929. For a short time he hired John F. Rider to be editor. Rider was a former engineer working with the US Army Signal Corps and a radio engineer for Alfred H. Grebe, a radio manufacturer. However, Rider would soon leave Gernsback and form his own publishing company, John F. Rider Publisher, New York around 1931.
Gernsback made use of the magazine to promote his interests,
including having his radio station's call letters on the cover starting
in 1925. WRNY and Radio News
were used to cross-promote each other, with programs on his station
often used to discuss articles he had published, and articles in the
magazine often covering program activities at WRNY. He also advocated
for future directions in innovation and regulation of radio. The
magazine contained many drawings and diagrams, encouraging radio
listeners of the 1920s to experiment themselves to improve the
technology. WRNY was often used as a laboratory to see if various radio
inventions were worthwhile.
Articles that were published about television were also tested in
this manner when the radio station was used to send pictures to
experimental television receivers in August 1928. The technology,
however, required sending sight and sound one after the other rather
than sending both at the same time, as WRNY only broadcast on one
channel. Such experiments were expensive, eventually contributing to
Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company going into bankruptcy in
1929.
WRNY was sold to Aviation Radio, who maintained the channel part-time
to broadcast aviation weather reports and related feature programs.
Along with other stations sharing the same frequency, it was acquired by
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and consolidated into that company's WHN in 1934.
List of magazines edited or published by Gernsback
November 1931 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics
Gernsback's decade of publishing SF magazines came to a close with the final issue of Wonder Stories in 1936. Aside from the short-lived Science-Fiction Plus in the 1950s, he never returned to that business
Air Wonder Stories – July 1929 to May 1930, merged with Science Wonder Stories to form Wonder Stories
Radio Listeners Guide and Call Book [title varies]
Radio News — July 1919 (as Radio Amateur News) to July 1948
Radio Program Weekly
Radio Review
Science and Invention – formerly Electrical Experimenter; published August 1920 to August 1931
Science and Mechanics – originally Everyday Mechanics; changed to Everyday Science and Mechanics in 1931. "Everyday" dropped as March 1937 issue, and published as Science and Mechanics until 1976
Gernsback held 80 patents by the time of his death in New York City on August 19, 1967.
His first patent was a new method for manufacturing dry-cell
batteries, a patent applied for on June 28, 1906, and granted February
5, 1907.
Among his inventions are a combined electric hair brush and comb
(US Patent 1,016,138), 1912; an ear cushion (US Patent 1,514,152), 1927;
and a hydraulic fishery (US Patent 2,718,083), 1955.
Other patents held by Gernsback are related to: Incandescent
Lamp, Electrorheostat Regulator, Electro Adjustable Condenser,
Detectorium, Relay, Potentiometer, Electrolytic Interrupter, Rotary
Variable Condenser, Luminous Electric Mirror, Transmitter, Postal Card,
Telephone Headband, Electromagnetic Sounding Device, Submersible
Amusement Device, Apparatus for Landing Flying Machines, Tuned Telephone
Receiver, Electric Valve, Detector, Acoustic Apparatus, Electrically
Operated Fountain, Cord Terminal, Coil Mounting, Radio Horn, Variable
Condenser, Switch, Telephone Receiver, Crystal Detector, Process for
Mounting Inductances, Depilator, Code Learner's Instrument.
Herbert George Wells
(21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in
many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of
social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His
work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback.
During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a
forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary
talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. 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", while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a "wild talent".
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. Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK) in 1934.
Life
Early life
Young Wells, "Bertie" as he was known, c. 1870s
Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. Called "Bertie" by his family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant.
An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they
sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock
was old and worn out, and the location was poor. Joseph Wells managed to
earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the shop and he
received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team.
A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg.
To pass the time he began to read books from the local library, brought
to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and
lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to
write. Later that year he entered Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a
private school
founded in 1849, following the bankruptcy of Morley's earlier school.
The teaching was erratic, the curriculum mostly focused, Wells later
said, on producing copperplate handwriting
and doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen. Wells continued at
Morley's Academy until 1880. In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, suffered
a fractured thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's
career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were
not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family
income.
Wells spent the winter of 1887-88 convalescing at Uppark, where his mother, Sarah, was the housekeeper.
No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations. From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at Hyde's Drapery Emporium in Southsea. His experiences at Hyde's, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and Kipps, which portray the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth.
Wells's parents had a turbulent marriage, owing primarily to his mother's being a Protestant and his father's being a freethinker. When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid (at Uppark, a country house in Sussex),
one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to
have living space for her husband and children. Thereafter, she and
Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained
faithful to each other. As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles
increased as he subsequently failed as a draper and also, later, as a
chemist's assistant. However, Uppark had a magnificent library in which
he immersed himself, reading many classic works, including Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, and the works of Daniel Defoe. This was the beginning of Wells's venture into literature.
Teacher
Commemorative plaque in Midhurst, West Sussex marking where Wells lodged while a teacher at Midhurst Grammar School between 1883 and 1884
In October 1879, Wells's mother arranged through a distant relative, Arthur Williams, for him to join the National School at Wookey in Somerset as a pupil–teacher, a senior pupil who acted as a teacher of younger children.
In December that year, however, Williams was dismissed for
irregularities in his qualifications and Wells was returned to Uppark.
After a short apprenticeship at a chemist in nearby Midhurst and an even shorter stay as a boarder at Midhurst Grammar School,
he signed his apprenticeship papers at Hyde's. In 1883, Wells persuaded
his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an
opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a
pupil–teacher; his proficiency in Latin and science during his earlier
short stay had been remembered.
The years he spent in Southsea had been the most miserable of his
life to that point, but his good fortune at securing a position at
Midhurst Grammar School meant that Wells could continue his
self-education in earnest. The following year, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London) in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley.
As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science
Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells
studied in his new school until 1887, with a weekly allowance of 21 shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship. This ought to have been a comfortable sum of money (at the time many working class families had "round about a pound a week" as their entire household income) yet in his Experiment in Autobiography,
Wells speaks of constantly being hungry, and indeed photographs of him
at the time show a youth who is very thin and malnourished.
He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years
mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society.
At first approaching the subject through Plato's Republic, he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society and free lectures delivered at Kelmscott House, the home of William Morris. He was also among the founders of The Science School Journal,
a school magazine that allowed him to express his views on literature
and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction; a precursor to his
novel The Time Machine was published in the journal under the title The Chronic Argonauts. The school year 1886–87 was the last year of his studies.
Wells studying in London c. 1890
During 1888, Wells stayed in Stoke-on-Trent, living in Basford. The unique environment of The Potteries
was certainly an inspiration. He wrote in a letter to a friend from the
area that "the district made an immense impression on me." The
inspiration for some of his descriptions in The War of the Worlds
is thought to have come from his short time spent here, seeing the iron
foundry furnaces burn over the city, shooting huge red light into the
skies. His stay in The Potteries also resulted in the macabre short
story "The Cone" (1895, contemporaneous with his famous The Time Machine), set in the north of the city.
After teaching for some time, he was briefly on the staff of Holt Academy in Wales
– Wells found it necessary to supplement his knowledge relating to
educational principles and methodology and entered the College of
Preceptors (College of Teachers). He later received his Licentiate and Fellowship FCP diplomas from the college. It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London External Programme. In 1889–90, he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School in London, where he taught A. A. Milne (whose father ran the school). His first published work was a Text-Book of Biology in two volumes (1893).
Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wells was left without
a source of income. His aunt Mary—his father's sister-in-law—invited
him to stay with her for a while, which solved his immediate problem of
accommodation. During his stay at his aunt's residence, he grew
increasingly interested in her daughter, Isabel, whom he later courted.
To earn money, he began writing short humorous articles for journals
such as The Pall Mall Gazette, later collecting these in volume form as Select Conversations with an Uncle (1895) and Certain Personal Matters
(1897). So prolific did Wells become at this mode of journalism that
many of his early pieces remain unidentified. According to David C.
Smith, "Most of Wells's occasional pieces have not been collected, and
many have not even been identified as his. Wells did not automatically
receive the byline his reputation demanded until after 1896 or so ... As
a result, many of his early pieces are unknown. It is obvious that many
early Wells items have been lost." His success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to write book-length work, and he published his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895.
Personal life
141 Maybury Rd, Woking, where Wells lived from May 1895 until late 1896
In 1891, Wells married his cousin
Isabel Mary Wells (1865–1931; from 1902 Isabel Mary Smith). The couple
agreed to separate in 1894, when he had fallen in love with one of his
students, Amy Catherine Robbins (1872–1927; later known as Jane), with
whom he moved to Woking,
Surrey, in May 1895. They lived in a rented house, 'Lynton', (now
No.141) Maybury Road in the town centre for just under 18 months and married at St Pancras register office in October 1895. His short period in Woking was perhaps the most creative and productive of his whole writing career, for while there he planned and wrote The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, completed The Island of Doctor Moreau, wrote and published The Wonderful Visit and The Wheels of Chance, and began writing two other early books, When the Sleeper Wakes and Love and Mr Lewisham.
In late summer 1896, Wells and Jane moved to a larger house in Worcester Park, near Kingston upon Thames, for two years; this lasted until his poor health took them to Sandgate, near Folkestone, where he constructed a large family home, Spade House, in 1901. He had two sons with Jane: George Philip (known as "Gip"; 1901–1985) and Frank Richard (1903–1982) (grandfather of film director Simon Wells). Jane died on 6 October 1927, in Dunmow, at the age of 55.
Wells had affairs with a significant number of women. In December 1909, he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society. Amber had married the barrister G. R. Blanco White in July of that year, as co-arranged by Wells. After Beatrice Webb
voiced disapproval of Wells's "sordid intrigue" with Amber, he
responded by lampooning Beatrice Webb and her husband Sidney Webb in his
1911 novel The New Machiavelli as 'Altiora and Oscar Bailey', a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators. Between 1910 and 1913, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim was one of his mistresses. In 1914, he had a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feministRebecca West, 26 years his junior. In 1920–21, and intermittently until his death, he had a love affair with the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger.
Between 1924 and 1933 he partnered with the 22-year younger Dutch adventurer and writer Odette Keun, with whom he lived in Lou Pidou, a house they built together in Grasse, France. Wells dedicated his longest book to her (The World of William Clissold, 1926). When visiting Maxim Gorky in Russia 1920, he had slept with Gorky's mistress Moura Budberg,
then still Countess Benckendorf and 27 years his junior. In 1933, when
she left Gorky and emigrated to London, their relationship renewed and
she cared for him through his final illness. Wells asked her to marry
him repeatedly, but Budberg strongly rejected his proposals.
In Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells wrote: "I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply". David Lodge's novel A Man of Parts
(2011)—a 'narrative based on factual sources' (author's note)—gives a
convincing and generally sympathetic account of Wells's relations with
the women mentioned above, and others.
One of
the ways that Wells expressed himself was through his drawings and
sketches. One common location for these 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 drew a considerable number
of pictures, many of them being overt comments on their marriage. During
this period, he called these pictures "picshuas". These picshuas have been the topic of study by Wells scholars for many years, and in 2006, a book was published on the subject.
According to James Gunn,
one of Wells's major contributions to the science fiction genre was his
approach, which he referred to as his "new system of ideas".
In his opinion, the author should always strive to make the story as
credible as possible, even if both the writer and the reader knew
certain elements are impossible, allowing the reader to accept the ideas
as something that could really happen, today referred to as "the
plausible impossible" and "suspension of disbelief".
While neither invisibility nor time travel was new in speculative
fiction, Wells added a sense of realism to the concepts which the
readers were not familiar with. He conceived the idea of using a vehicle
that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or
backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle. He explained that while writing The Time Machine,
he realized that "the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more
ordinary must be the setting, and the circumstances in which I now set
the Time Traveller were all that I could imagine of solid upper-class comforts."
In "Wells's Law", a science fiction story should contain only a single
extraordinary assumption. Therefore, as justifications for the
impossible, he employed scientific ideas and theories. Wells's
best-known statement of the "law" appears in his introduction to a
collection of his works published in 1934:
As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole
business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and
real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence
to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption
immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention.
Dr. Griffin / The Invisible Man
is a brilliant research scientist who discovers a method of
invisibility, but finds himself unable to reverse the process. An
enthusiast of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an
iconic character in horror fiction. The Island of Doctor Moreau sees a shipwrecked man left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The earliest depiction of uplift,
the novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain
and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human
interference with nature. In The First Men in the Moon Wells used the idea of radio communication between astronomical objects, a plot point inspired by Nikola Tesla's claim that he had received radio signals from Mars. Though Tono-Bungay
is 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", with the first description of a nuclear weapon. 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
explosives—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". In 1932, the physicist and conceiver of nuclear chain reactionLeó Szilárd read The World Set Free (the same year Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron), a book which he said made a great impression on him. In addition to writing early science fiction, he produced work dealing with mythological beings like an angel in the novel The Wonderful Visit (1895) and a mermaid in the novel The Sea Lady (1902).
Wells also wrote non-fiction. His 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. It offered the immediate political message of the privileged
sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes
from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able,
rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders. 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
populations 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 bestselling two-volume work, The Outline of History (1920), began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians.
However, it was very popular amongst the general population and made
Wells a rich man. Many other authors followed with "Outlines" of their
own in other subjects. He reprised his Outline in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the World, a history book praised by Albert Einstein, and two long efforts, The Science of Life (1930)—written with his son G. P. Wells and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, 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 re-edited (2006).
H. G. Wells c. 1918
From quite early in Wells's 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). Men Like Gods (1923) is also a utopian novel. Wells in this period was regarded as an enormously influential figure; the critic Malcolm Cowley stated: "by the time he was forty, his influence was wider than any other living English writer".
Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as The First Men in the Moon, where nature is completely suppressed by nurture, and The Island of Doctor Moreau,
where the strong presence of nature represents a threat to a civilized
society. Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells
also wrote a dystopian 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 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.
H. G. Wells, one day before his 60th birthday, on the front cover of Time magazine, 20 September 1926
In 1927, a Canadian teacher and writer Florence Deeks unsuccessfully sued Wells for infringement of copyright and breach of trust, claiming that much of The Outline of History had been plagiarised from her unpublished manuscript, The Web of the World's Romance, which had spent nearly nine months in the hands of Wells's Canadian publisher, Macmillan Canada.
However, it was sworn on oath at the trial that the manuscript remained
in Toronto in the safekeeping of Macmillan, and that Wells did not even
know it existed, let alone had seen it.
The court found no proof of copying, and decided the similarities were
due to the fact that the books had similar nature and both writers had
access to the same sources. In 2000, A. B. McKillop, a professor of history at Carleton University, produced a book on the case, The Spinster & The Prophet: Florence Deeks, H. G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past.
According to McKillop, the lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the
prejudice against a woman suing a well-known and famous male author, and
he paints a detailed story based on the circumstantial evidence of the
case. In 2004, Denis N. Magnusson, Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Law, Queen's University, Ontario, published an article on Deeks v. Wells.
This re-examines the case in relation to McKillop's book. While having
some sympathy for Deeks, he argues that she had a weak case that was not
well presented, and though she may have met with sexism
from her lawyers, she received a fair trial, adding that the law
applied is essentially the same law that would be applied to a similar
case today (i.e., 2004).
In 1933, Wells predicted in The Shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin in January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true four months early, in September 1939, with the outbreak of World War II. In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopaedia,
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".
Prior to 1933, Wells's books were widely read in Germany and
Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated
shortly after publication.
By 1933, he had attracted the attention of German officials because of
his criticism of the political situation in Germany, and on 10 May 1933,
Wells's books were burned by the Nazi youth in Berlin's Opernplatz, and his works were banned from libraries and book stores. Wells, as president of PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), 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. At a PEN conference in Ragusa, Wells refused to yield to Nazi sympathisers who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking. Near the end of World War II, 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, with Wells included in the alphabetical list of "The Black Book".
Wartime works
Title page of Wells's The War That Will End War (1914)
Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells wrote Floor Games (1911) followed by Little Wars (1913), which set out rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers (miniatures). Little Wars is recognised as the first recreational war game and Wells is regarded by gamers and hobbyists as "the Father of Miniature War Gaming". A pacifist prior to the First World War, Wells stated "how much better is this amiable miniature [war] than the real thing". According to Wells, the idea of the game developed from a visit by his friend Jerome K. Jerome. After dinner, Jerome began shooting down toy soldiers with a toy cannon and Wells joined in to compete.
During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First
World War, Wells published a number of articles in London newspapers
that subsequently appeared as a book entitled The War That Will End War. He coined the expression with the idealistic belief that the result of the war would make a future conflict impossible. Wells blamed the Central Powers for the coming of the war and argued that only the defeat of German militarism could bring about an end to war. Wells used the shorter form of the phrase, "the war to end war", in In the Fourth Year (1918), in which he noted that the phrase "got into circulation" in the second half of 1914. In fact, it had become one of the most common catchphrases of the war.
In 1918 Wells worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau, also called Wellington House. Wells was also one of fifty-three leading British authors — a number that included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
— who signed their names to the “Authors' Declaration.” This manifesto
declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime,
and that Britain “could not without dishonour have refused to take part
in the present war.”
Travels to Russia and the Soviet Union
Wells visited Russia three times: 1914, 1920 and 1934. During his second visit, he saw his old friend Maxim Gorky and with Gorky's help, met Vladimir Lenin. In his book Russia in the Shadows,
Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, "the
completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation." On 23 July 1934, after visiting U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for three hours for the New Statesman
magazine, which was extremely rare at that time. He told Stalin how he
had seen 'the happy faces of healthy people' in contrast with his
previous visit to Moscow in 1920. However, he also criticised the lawlessness, class discrimination, state violence, and absence of free expression. Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly. As the chairman of the London-based PEN International,
which protected the rights of authors to write without being
intimidated, Wells hoped by his trip to USSR, he could win Stalin over
by force of argument. Before he left, he realised that no reform was to
happen in the near future.
Final years
H. G. Wells in 1943
Wells’s greatest literary output occurred before the First World War,
which was lamented by younger authors whom he had influenced. In this
connection, George Orwell described Wells as "too sane to understand the modern world", and "since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons." G. K. Chesterton quipped: "Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message".
Wells had diabetes, and was a co-founder in 1934 of The Diabetic Association (now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK).
On 28 October 1940, on the radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Welles, who two years previously had performed a famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
During the interview, by Charles C Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells
admitted his surprise at the sensation that resulted from the broadcast
but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his
"more obscure" titles.
Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park, London. In his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You damned fools". Wells's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 16 August 1946; his ashes were subsequently scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks, the most eastern point of the Jurassic Coast and about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) from Swanage in Dorset.
"Novelist and thinker". Statue of H. G. Wells by Wesley Harland in Woking
A futurist and “visionary”, Wells foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. Asserting that "Wells' visions of the future remain unsurpassed", John Higgs, author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,
states that in the late 19th century Wells “saw the coming century
clearer than anyone else. He anticipated wars in the air, the sexual
revolution, motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs and a
proto-Wikipedia he called the "world brain". In his novel The World Set Free,
he imagined an “atomic bomb” of terrifying power that would be dropped
from aeroplanes. This was an extraordinary insight for an author writing
in 1913, and it made a deep impression on Winston Churchill."
Many readers have hailed H. G.
Wells and George Orwell as special kinds of writers, ones endowed with
remarkable prescriptive and prophetic powers. Wells was the
twentieth-century prototype of this literary vatic figure: he invented
the role, explored its possibilities, especially through new forms of
prose and new ways to publish, and defined its boundaries. His impact on
his culture was profound; as George Orwell wrote, "The minds of all of
us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if
Wells had never existed."
— The Author as Cultural Hero: H. G. Wells and George Orwell.
In 2011, Wells was among a group of science fiction writers featured in the Prophets of Science Fiction series, a show produced and hosted by film director Sir Ridley Scott,
which depicts how predictions influenced the development of scientific
advancements by inspiring many readers to assist in transforming those
futuristic visions into everyday reality. In a 2013 review of The Time Machine for the New Yorker magazine, Brad Leithauser
writes, "At the base of Wells's great visionary exploit is this
rational, ultimately scientific attempt to tease out the potential
future consequences of present conditions—not as they might arise in a
few years, or even decades, but millennia hence, epochs hence. He is
world literature's Great Extrapolator. Like no other fiction writer
before him, he embraced "deep time."
Churchill
avidly read Wells. An October 1906 Churchill speech was partly inspired
by Wells's ideas of a supportive state as a "Utopia". Two days
earlier, Churchill had written Wells: "I owe you a great debt."
Wells was a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society. Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells's books, and after they first met in 1902 they kept in touch until Wells died in 1946.
As a junior minister Churchill borrowed lines from Wells for one of his
most famous early landmark speeches in 1906, and as Prime Minister the
phrase "the gathering storm"—used by Churchill to describe the rise of Nazi Germany—had been written by Wells in The War of the Worlds, which depicts an attack on Britain by Martians. Wells's extensive writings on equality and human rights, most notably his most influential work, The Rights of Man (1940), laid the groundwork for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after his death.
His efforts regarding the League of Nations, on which he collaborated on the project with Leonard Woolf with the booklets The Idea of a League of Nations, Prolegomena to the Study of World Organization, and The Way of the League of Nations,
became a disappointment as the organization turned out to be a weak
one unable to prevent the Second World War, which itself occurred
towards the very end of his life and only increased the pessimistic side
of his nature. In his last book Mind at the End of Its Tether
(1945), he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another
species might not be a bad idea. He referred to the era between the two
World Wars as "The Age of Frustration".
Religious views
Wells's views on God and religion changed over his lifetime. Early in
his life he distanced himself from Christianity, and later from theism, and finally, late in life, he was essentially atheistic. Martin Gardner summarises this progression:
[The
younger Wells] ... did not object to using the word "God" provided it
did not imply anything resembling human personality. In his middle years
Wells went through a phase of defending the concept of a "finite God,"
similar to the god of such process theologians as Samuel Alexander, Edgar Brightman, and Charles Hartshorne. (He even wrote a book about it called God the Invisible King.) Later Wells decided he was really an atheist.
In God the Invisible King (1917), Wells wrote that his idea of God did not draw upon the traditional religions of the world:
This
book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief
of the writer. [Which] is a profound belief in a personal and intimate
God. ... Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two
antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by
speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the
other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God;
the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most
highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God
tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with
justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and
awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is contradictory to
this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer
suggested that the great outline of the theological struggles of that
phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a
persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of
God into one focus.
Later in the work, he aligns himself with a "renascent or modern
religion ... neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor
Christian ... [that] he has found growing up in himself".
Of Christianity,
he said: "it is not now true for me. ... Every believing Christian is, I
am sure, my spiritual brother ... but if systemically I called myself a
Christian I feel that to most men I should imply too much and so tell a
lie". Of other world religions, he writes: "All these religions are
true for me as Canterbury Cathedral
is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are,
and they have served a purpose, they have worked. Only they are not true
for me to live in them. ... They do not work for me". In The Fate of Homo Sapiens
(1939), Wells criticised almost all world religions and philosophies,
stating "there is no creed, no way of living left in the world at all,
that really meets the needs of the time… When we come to look at them
coolly and dispassionately, all the main religions, patriotic, moral and
customary systems in which human beings are sheltering today, appear to
be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement, like the
houses and palaces and other buildings of some vast, sprawling city
overtaken by a landslide.
Wells's opposition to organised religion reached a fever pitch in 1943 with publication of his book Crux Ansata, subtitled "An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church".
The science fiction historian John Clute
describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen",
and notes his work has been central to both British and American science
fiction. Science fiction author and critic Algis Budrys
said Wells "remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the
despair, which are embodied in the technology and which are the major
facts of life in our world". He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, 1932, 1935, and 1946. Wells so influenced real exploration of space that an impact crater on Mars (and the Moon) was named after him.
Wells's genius was his ability to
create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air.
Originality was Wells's calling card. In a six-year stretch from 1895 to
1901, he produced a stream of what he called “scientific romance”
novels, which included The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon. This was a dazzling display of new thought, endlessly copied since. A book like The War of the Worlds
inspired every one of the thousands of alien invasion stories that
followed. It burned its way into the psyche of mankind and changed us
all forever.
In the United Kingdom, Wells's work was a key model for the British
"scientific romance", and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon, J. D. Beresford, S. Fowler Wright, and Naomi Mitchison,
all drew on Wells's example. Wells was also an important influence on
British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss expressing strong admiration for Wells's work. Among contemporary British science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter, Christopher Priest and Adam Roberts have all acknowledged Wells's influence on their writing; all three are Vice-Presidents of the H. G. Wells Society. He also had a strong influence on British scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), "The Last Judgement" and "On Being the Right Size" from the essay collection Possible Worlds (1927), and Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years
(1963), which are speculations about the future of human evolution and
life on other planets. Haldane gave several lectures about these topics
which in turn influenced other science fiction writers.
Wells's works were reprinted in American science fiction magazines as late as the 1950s
Sinclair Lewis's early novels were strongly influenced by Wells's realistic social novels, such as The History of Mr Polly; Lewis also named his first son Wells after the author. Lewis nominated H. G. Wells for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Vladimir Nabokov described Wells as his favourite writer when he was a boy and "a great artist." He went on to cite The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, and The Country of the Blind
as superior to anything else written by Wells's British contemporaries.
Nabokov said: "His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of
course, but his romances and fantasies are superb."
2016 illustrated postal envelope with an image from The War of the Worlds, Russian Post, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the author's birth
Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short pieces on Wells in which he demonstrates a deep familiarity with much of Wells's work. While Borges wrote several critical reviews, including a mostly negative review of Wells's film Things to Come, he regularly treated Wells as a canonical figure of fantastic literature. Late in his life, Borges included The Invisible Man and The Time Machine in his Prologue to a Personal Library, a curated list of 100 great works of literature that he undertook at the behest of the Argentine publishing house Emecé. Canadian author Margaret Atwood read Wells's books, and he also inspired writers of European speculative fiction such as Karel Čapek and Yevgeny Zamyatin.