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The Time Machine is an 1895 dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who travels approximately 802,701 years into the future.
- H. G. Wells
- 1895
Sep 26, 2024 · The Time Machine, first novel by H. G. Wells, published in book form in 1895. The novel is considered one of the earliest works of science fiction and the progenitor of the “ time travel ” subgenre.
- Laura Marcus
- Overview
- Early life
- Early writings
- Middle and late works
At age 18, H.G. Wells won a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied under T.H. Huxley. He graduated from London University in 1888 and became a science teacher. His study of biology spurred him to hope that human society might evolve into higher forms.
What did H.G. Wells write?
H.G. Wells was a versatile author. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, his early publications, were science fiction novels that remain classics today. The War of the Worlds gave popular mythology to the image of the Martian. He went on to write comic novels of lower middle-class life and popular educational books.
What was H.G. Wells’s view on human progress?
H.G. Wells was an optimist of a type characteristic of his generation, which was breaking free from Victorian norms. He believed in the doctrine of social progress and championed sexual freedom. After Word War I, however, Wells became more pessimistic about human progress, as reflected in the bitter tone of his later books.
H.G. Wells (born September 21, 1866, Bromley, Kent, England—died August 13, 1946, London) English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly.
Wells was the son of domestic servants turned small shopkeepers. He grew up under the continual threat of poverty, and at age 14, after a very inadequate education supplemented by his inexhaustible love of reading, he was apprenticed to a draper in Windsor. His employer soon dismissed him; and he became assistant to a chemist, then to another drape...
Wells’s first published book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). With his first novel, The Time Machine (1895), which was immediately successful, he began a series of science fiction novels that revealed him as a writer of marked originality and an immense fecundity of ideas: The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). He also wrote many short stories, which were collected in The Stolen Bacillus (1895), The Plattner Story (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899). For a time he acquired a reputation as a prophet of the future, and indeed, in The War in the Air (1908), he foresaw certain developments in the military use of aircraft. But his imagination flourished at its best not in the manner of the comparatively mechanical anticipations of Jules Verne but in the astronomical fantasies of The First Men in the Moon and The War of the Worlds, from the latter of which the image of the Martian has passed into popular mythology.
Behind his inventiveness lay a passionate concern for man and society, which increasingly broke into the fantasy of his science fiction, often diverting it into satire and sometimes, as in The Food of the Gods, destroying its credibility. Eventually, Wells decided to abandon science fiction for comic novels of lower middle-class life, most notably in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). In these novels, and in Tono-Bungay (1909), he drew on memories of his own earlier life, and, through the thoughts of inarticulate yet often ambitious heroes, revealed the hopes and frustrations of clerks, shop assistants, and underpaid teachers, who had rarely before been treated in fiction with such sympathetic understanding. In these novels, too, he made his liveliest, most persuasive comment on the problems of Western society that were soon to become his main preoccupation. The sombre vision of a dying world in The Time Machine shows that, in his long-term view of humanity’s prospects, Wells felt much of the pessimism prevalent in the 1890s. In his short-term view, however, his study of biology led him to hope that human society would evolve into higher forms, and with Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), and A Modern Utopia (1905), he took his place in the British public’s mind as a leading preacher of the doctrine of social progress. About this time, too, he became an active socialist, and in 1903 joined the Fabian Society, though he soon began to criticize its methods. The bitter quarrel he precipitated by his unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the Fabian Society from George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1906–07 is retold in his novel The New Machiavelli (1911), in which the Webbs are parodied as the Baileys.
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The Literary World (Famous Novels)
After about 1906 the pamphleteer and the novelist were in conflict in Wells, and only The History of Mr. Polly and the lighthearted Bealby (1915) can be considered primarily as fiction. His later novels are mainly discussions of social or political themes that show little concern for the novel as a literary form. Wells himself affected not to care about the literary merit of his work, and he rejected the tutelage of the American novelist Henry James, saying, “I would rather be called a journalist than an artist.” Indeed, his novel Boon (1915) included a spiteful parody of James. His next novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), though touched by the prejudice and shortsightedness of wartime, gives a brilliant picture of the English people in World War I.
World War I shook Wells’s faith in even short-term human progress, and in subsequent works he modified his conception of social evolution, putting forward the view that man could only progress if he would adapt himself to changing circumstances through knowledge and education. To help bring about this process of adaptation Wells began an ambitious work of popular education, of which the main products were The Outline of History (1920; revised 1931), The Science of Life (1931), cowritten with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells (his elder son by his second wife), and The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1932). At the same time he continued to publish works of fiction, in which his gifts of narrative and dialogue give way almost entirely to polemics. His sense of humour reappears, however, in the reminiscences of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934).
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Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography.
Apr 2, 2014 · H.G. Wells was a writer of science-fiction works, including 'The Time Machine' and 'War of the Worlds,' who had a great influence on our vision of the future.
Time travel is such a familiar fictive concept nowadays that it’s easy to forget how new the idea of a time machine was in 1895, when the then 29-year-old H.G. Wells wrote a short novel titled The Time Machine. And 125 years later, this concise little masterpiece of science fiction has lost none of its power; if anything, it seems more and ...
When/Where Written: H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine while in England. Published: The Time Machine was published in 1895 as a serial novel. Literary Period: Victorian Period. Point of View: H.G. Wells deploys a first-person narrator called Hillyer.
