Tony Rossiter looks at a founding father of science fiction who was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature

He was a hugely prolific writer, the author of more than 100 books. He wrote non-fiction, novels in many genres, short stories, social commentary, essays, satire, biography and autobiography. Today he is best known for his science fiction; his imagination, informed by his scientific training, was inventive and ahead of its time. Time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, biological engineering – they all feature in the ‘scientific romances’ (as they were called at the time) that established his reputation. He also drew on his own lower-middle-class background to write highly regarded novels of social realism which led some critics to see him as a successor to Dickens. But he was, above all, a founding father of science fiction, and that’s what I’ll focus on here, together with Kipps, one of his best-known works of social realism.

Beginnings

Born in 1866 into a working-class family in Bromley, Wells was confined to bed at the age of seven after breaking a leg. He read library books brought home by his father and became an avid reader. When his mother obtained work at a country house in Sussex, Wells had access to its library and read classic works such as Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia and the works of Daniel Defoe. After an unhappy three years as an apprentice draper in Southsea, he obtained a position as pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and then won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College, London), where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. The influence of Huxley’s course on elementary biology and zoology can be seen in much of his writing.