Tales of Space and Time

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer best remembered today for his science fiction works. Wells and Jules Verne are each sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". --- He has foretold many futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive... There was, for example, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles": "his name was George McWhirter; ... he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up, and freckles." This unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he wills, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. --- We shudder at the thought of humanity being suffocated on a blazing world as in "The Star", ... which is a little gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone... Those were the days when Mr. Wells was writing for pleasure. He was enabled to throw off in the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly varied in style and theme. As he became more experienced in the art of writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. Many of them he later worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally. --- In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science is prophecy... The mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. It is the natural result of his scientific training, which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and very illuminative point of view. (Edwin E. Slosson)