H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells (September 21,1866 – August 13, 1946) is an English writer.

He is prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games.

He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.

During his own lifetime, however, he is most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devotes his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale.

A futurist, he writes a number of utopian works and foresees the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.

His science fiction imagines time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering.

Wells renders 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!".

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 is nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Wells's earliest specialized training is in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters takes place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context.

He is also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathizing with pacifist views.

His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and he writes little science fiction, while he sometimes indicates on official documents that his profession is that of journalist.

Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, lead to the suggestion that he is a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells describes a range of social strata and even attempts, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.

Wells is a diabetic and co-founds the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK) in 1934. 

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