The War Inside H. G. Wells
In his nonfiction, he laid out a vision of endless human progress. In his fiction, he foretold a darker truth.
By Adam Gopnik
H. G. Wells is remembered today mostly as the author of four visionary science-fiction perennials with premises so simple and strong that they can sustain any amount of retelling: “The War of the Worlds,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine,” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Social historians recall Wells as one of the brighter technological optimists and left-wing polemicists of the early part of the twentieth century. He is also remembered, among Brits with a taste for evergreen gossip, as perhaps the most erotically adventurous man of his generation, the satyr of the socialists. “I have done what I pleased,” he wrote. “Every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself.” The case is sometimes even made that Wells invented the word “sex”—that he pioneered its modern use, in his 1900 novel, “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” as a shorthand for the totality of the activity...
Yet Wells’s life is so diverting, to use an old-fashioned word, that we can overlook the running current of his literary career. He didn’t just dabble in fantasy; he made the idea of extrapolating the future from the present a foundation of modern sensibility...
It was a vertiginous and sudden ascent. Wells, born in 1866, was a lower-middle-class boy who wanted to become someone of the same scale and sort as his sometime friend Bertrand Russell—a university wit, a man of science, a popularizer, a magus of the mind. (And, like Russell, a Don Juan.) Yet he suffered a cruel variety of class prejudice... Wells’s parents, as he was acutely aware, were themselves household servants, who then became shopkeepers and apprenticed Wells to a draper when he was fourteen. Through his own exertions, he managed to get into a decent school and begin his adventures.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/the-war-inside-h-g-wells-claire-tomalin-the-young-h-g-wells-changing-the-world