The Worlds of H. G. Wells Simon J
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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS POPPERFOTO/GETTY Wells in 1931, about to leave London for a tour of the United States. SCIENCE JOURNALS The worlds of H. G. Wells Simon J. James looks back at the richly varied contribution of the science-fiction writer and science popularizer. erbert George Wells (1866–1946) powered flight, space travel, tanks and the writers to be a trained scientist. The word occupies a singular place in science atomic bomb, and becoming an enthusiastic ‘scientist’ had been coined by historian and culture. Practically reinvent- and committed popularizer of science. William Whewell just 33 years before Wells’s Hing science fiction in landmark books such Behind Wells’s enormous output was a birth. Wells — the child of servants-turned- as The War of the Worlds, he also wrote desire to use writing to make the world better shopkeepers — escaped apprenticeships in prolifically on science, education, history — by projecting either a utopian vision of a drapers’ shops to become a pupil-teacher and politics: in a career spanning 6 dec- perfected future, or dystopias revealing how at Midhurst Grammar School in the south ades, he penned more than 150 books and the lessons of his work went unheeded. of England. A scholarship propelled him to pamphlets, as well as numerous articles Among his extraordinary achievements, what is now Imperial College London, where in, and letters to, the press. Living through Wells was one of the earliest major English he studied biology under champion of Dar- the late-nineteenth-century burgeoning of winism T. H. Huxley, graduating in 1890. He the sciences, the societal and technological SCIENCE. FICTION. never practised as a scientist; nor did he see upheavals of the early twentieth century and A Nature special issue himself as an ‘artist’, preferring ‘journalist’, two world wars, Wells both absorbed rev- nature.com/scifispecial particularly later in his career, when politics elations and delivered some — foreseeing became more important in his writing. 162 | NATURE | VOL 537 | 8 SEPTEMBER©2016 M 2016ac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS BOOKS& ARTS & ARTSCOMMENT Wells’s brilliance as a communicator of science drew him to many friendships with scientists — not least Richard Gregory. The astronomer, who was at university with Wells, was Nature’s second editor. Wells was to pub- lish 25 pieces in the journal over 50 years, inspiring and provoking scores of contempo- rary thinkers into contributing a rolling tide of correspondence, book reviews, notices and other commentary on his output. Wells was also publishing inspired books at a furious pace. His first were the scientific textbooks Honours Physiography and Text- book of Biology (both 1893); the latter went into many editions. The topics rapidly rami- fied. The year 1895 alone saw a short-story collection (The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents), a fantastic L.45/3317; BOTTOM: LONDON FILMS/UNITED ARTISTS/THE KOBAL COLLECTION KOBAL FILMS/UNITED ARTISTS/THE LONDON L.45/3317; BOTTOM: romance in which an “Wells was angel falls to Earth driven by the (The Wonderful Visit) conviction that TOP: ILLUSTRATION: HENRIQUE ALVIM CORRÊA. REPRODUCTION: (C) BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. BOARD. (C) BRITISH LIBRARY CORRÊA. REPRODUCTION: HENRIQUE ALVIM ILLUSTRATION: TOP: and a volume of education was essays, as well as his paramount to first full-length work clear thinking of fiction, The Time and efficient, Machine. That book, happy lives.” with Wells’s other late-1890s ‘scientific romances’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, would set the bar for science fiction. They are also among a num- ber of books by Wells that had an impact on science itself. The War of the Worlds inspired Robert Goddard — inventor of the liquid-fuelled rocket, whose research led to NASA’s Apollo programme — to devote his life to space travel. The book’s “heat-rays” also presaged military lasers. The hero of The Island of Doc- tor Moreau, Edward Prendick, “had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley”; the book’s animal–human hybrids are rough precursors to today’s embryonic chimaeras. Wells’s 1914 The World Set Free predicted the atomic bomb, drawing on and subsequently influencing chemist Frederick Soddy’s work on radioactivity, and influencing physicist Leo Szilard in his work on the neutron chain reaction. The Shape of Things to Come (1933) foreshadows the Sec- ond World War, and its 1936 film adaptation Things to Come (produced by Alexander Korda and starring Raymond Massey) ends with humanity launching its first spacecraft. Wells was irritated by comparisons to fel- low science-fiction giant Jules Verne. The feel- ing was mutual. Verne complained that the antigravity metal cavorite in Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901) was pure invention, compared to the gunpowder-fuelled rocket in his own 1865 From the Earth to the Moon. But Wells’s main interest was never technol- ogy. After inventing the insectoid bodies of the Selenites in The First Men in the Moon, An illustration for The War of the Worlds drawn by Henrique Alvim Corrêa (top) and a still from the 1936 or the mind-reading aliens of 1937’s The film adaptation of The Shape of Things to Come. ©2016 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. Al8l r iSEPTEMBERghts reserved. 2016 | VOL 537 | NATURE | 163 COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS Camford Visitation, he went on to imag- annual meeting of the British Science Guild extension and replacement from the original ine the significance of these fantastic elements (Nature 99, 186–187; 1917). His hope was thinkers in the world everywhere. Every uni- for human psychology and culture, setting a that, if the intellectual enquirer were armed versity and research institution should feed template that has since been followed by the with the right kinds of knowledge, history it. Every fresh mind should be brought into most literary of science fiction (from the likes might be predicted like the movements of contact with its standing editorial organiza- of Margaret Atwood and China Miéville). planets and tides. Then, informed by the tion ... its contents would be the standard Wells was also honing his journalistic knowledge of humanity’s shared evolution- source of material for the instructional side of skills. His first essay in Nature, ‘Popularising ary origins, the history of the future would see school and college work, for the verification Science’ (Nature nation states dissolving in favour of a system of facts and the testing of statements — every 50, 300–301; 1894), “For Wells, the of cooperative world government. where in the world. asks for standards scientific method Wells’s significance over most of his career to be set in popular conferred on rested on his status as a public intellectual, World Brain (1938) amplified these ideas. scientific writing to its user the and he relished the international audience This book, with the 1920 The Outline of His- promote accessibil- authority to reached by his publications. His prescience tory — a best-selling opus on the story of ity. He would go on was a vital element of his popularity, and not humanity from its evolutionary origins to his to publish Nature rethink and just in science fiction. For instance, he imag- hoped-for utopia — was Wells’s response to articles on a range challenge stale ined something like a World State-sponsored the catastrophe of the First World War. of subjects (see ideas.” Wikipedia. In an address to the Royal Institu- Wells lived to see the catastrophe of the John S. Partington’s tion in 1936 on the “World Encyclopaedia” or second. Having witnessed such a failure to act admirable and comprehensive H. G. Wells “World Brain”, he described it as: collectively, his final contribution to Nature, in Nature, 1893–1946; Peter Lang, 2008). in 1944, was an attempt to understand the But education, more than fiction, science the mental background of every intelligent actions and motivations of the individual. or indeed science fiction, was to become the man in the world. It should be alive and grow- ‘The Illusion of Personality’ suggests that the keynote of Wells’s writing career. ing and changing continually, under revision, notion of a stable personality is an illusion, Owing, in part, to his own escape from because consciousness constantly flits from apprenticeship into an intellectual life, Wells one moment to the next (Nature 153, 395– was driven by the conviction that education 397; 1944). Reading the piece now, it is fasci- was paramount to clear thinking and effi- nating to see a writer so long concerned with cient, happy lives. Even his most fantastic, thinking on a global scale, and over hundreds futuristic writings contained lessons for the to thousands of years, preoccupied at the end present, intended to lead to a more utopian of his career with the micro-impressions of a ordering of the world. A lecture to the Royal single, impermanent sensibility. Institution of Great Britain, published as Wells knew, and argued with, most of the ‘The Discovery of the Future’ (Nature 65, significant writers and political leaders of the 326–331; 1902), offers a window on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centu- development of these ideas, arguing for the ries. Two friendships were constant: one with importance of conscious forward-thinking: fellow novelist Arnold Bennett, the other with Gregory. Before he became editor of Nature, We travel on roads so narrow that they suf- Gregory had co-authored Honours Physiog- focate our traffic; we live in uncomfortable, raphy with Wells; he was an assistant editor inconvenient, life-wasting houses out of a love at the journal when Wells, a then-unknown of familiar shapes and familiar customs and teacher and jobbing science writer, published TOP: BBC PHOTO LIBRARY; BOTTOM: ARCHIVIO GBB/CONTRASTO/EYEVINE BOTTOM: LIBRARY; BBC PHOTO TOP: a dread of strangeness; all our public affairs ‘Popularising Science’.