H. G. Wells

1866–1946

Herbert George Wells was born over a small china shop in Kent, the son of a housemaid and a failed shopkeeper. He was apprenticed to a draper, and hated it, until a scholarship took him to London to study science under T. H. Huxley, the great defender of Darwin.

The Time Machine (1895) made his name, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds followed within three years. He later wrote novels, histories and books on how the world should be run, foresaw tanks, aerial bombing and the atomic bomb, and died in London in 1946.

H. G. Wells on the site

The War of the WorldsPublished in 1898 About 4 hours read A cylinder falls from the sky onto Horsell Common, near London. Something unscrews its lid from inside, and the crowd that gathers to look is burned to ash by an invisible ray. Within days giant three-legged machines are wading across the Thames, and a man with no name tries to reach his wife through a country falling apart. H. G. Wells's 1898 novel is the first great story of an alien invasion.

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