Have you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories? What was happening in their lives to inspire their famous works? What was happening in the world at the time that they wrote those stories you love?

Join Host Bree Carlile while she helps to answer some of the questions you have always had about your favorite classic novelists.

For the next few weeks we will talk about the life of H.G. Wells. What inspired him to write The Time Machine? What else was happening in the world at the time?

Come with us as we release one episode each Tuesday detailing the life and history at the time of your favorite authors.

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Welcome to Bite At A Time Books Behind the Story, where we answer the questions you have about your favorite classic authors.

What inspired your favorite author to write their novels?

What was going on in the world at the time?

Follow along with us as we tell you what was happening in the world while your favorite authors wrote your favorite classics.

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Wherever you listen to podcasts right now, we are reading The Time Machine.

Today we'll be talking about the life of HG.

Wells.

Herbert George Wells, September 26 to August 13, 1946, was an English writer prolific in many genres.

He wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography, and autobiography.

His work also included two books on recreational war games.

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

During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forwardlooking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale.

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

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

Brian Aldis referred to Wells as the Shakespeare of science fiction, while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a wild talent.

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work dubbed Wells's Law, leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as oh realist of the fantastic.

His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine, which was his first novel, The Island of Dr.

Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and the Military science fiction, The War in the Air Welles was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

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

He was also an outspoken socialist from a young age, often, but not always as at the beginning of the First World War, sympathizing with pacifist views.

His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of a journalist.

Novels such as Kip's and The History of Mr Polly, which described Lower Middleclass life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens.

But Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted in Tono Bungay a diagnosis of English society as a whole.

Wells was a diabetic and cofounded the charity the Diabetic Association, known today as Diabetes UK.

In 1934, Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on September 21, 866.

Called Birdie by his family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer, and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant.

An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold China and sporting goods.

Although it failed to prosper, the stock was old and worn out and the location was poor.

Joseph Wells managed to earn a meager income, but little of it came from the shop, and he received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent County team.

A defining incident of young Wells'life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg.

To pass the time, he began to read books from the local library brought to him by his father.

He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access.

They also stimulated his desire to write.

Later that year he entered Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a private school founded in 1849 following the bankruptcy of Morley's earlier school.

The teaching was erratic, the curriculum mostly focused, Wells later said, on producing copper plate handwriting and doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen.

Wells continued at Morley's Academy until 1880.

In 1877 his father, Joseph Welles, suffered a fractured thigh.

The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income.

No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations.

From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a Draper in Hyde's Drapery Emporium in South Sea.

His experiences at Hyde's, where he worked a 13 hours day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels, The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly and Kits, which portray the life of a Draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth.

Wells parent had a turbulent marriage, owing primarily to his mother's being a Protestant and his father's being a free thinker.

When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid at Upperc, a country house in Sussex, one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children.

Thereafter she and Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained faithful to each other.

As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased, as he subsequently failed as a Draper and also later as a chemist's assistant.

However, Upperc had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself reading many classic works, including Plato's Republic, Thomas Moore's Utopia, and the works of Daniel Dafoe.

This was the beginning of Welles's venture into literature.

In October 1879, Wells's mother arranged through a distant relative, Arthur Williams, for him to join the National School at Wookie in Somerset as a pupil teacher, a senior pupil who acted as a teacher of younger children.

In December that year, however, Williams was dismissed for irregularities in his qualifications, and Welsh returned to Upperc after a short apprenticeship at a chemist in nearby Midhurst and an even shorter stay as a border at Midhurst Grammar School.

He signed his apprenticeship papers at Hydes.

In 1883.

Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a pupil teacher.

His proficiency in Latin and science during his earlier short stay had been remembered.

The years he spent in South Sea had been the most miserable of his life to that point, but his good fortune at securing a position at Midhurst Grammar School meant that Welles could continue his selfeducation in earnest.

The following year Welles won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley.

As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first President in 19 nine well studied in his new school until 1887, with a weekly allowance of 21 shillings a guinea.

Thanks to his scholarship, this ought to have been a comfortable sum of money at the time.

Many working class families had round about a pound a week as their entire household income.

Yet in his experiment in autobiography, Wells speaks of constantly being hungry, and indeed photographs of him at the time show a youth who was very thin and malnourished.

He soon entered the debating society of the school.

These years marked the beginning of his interest in a possible Reformation of society.

At first approaching the subject through Plato's Republic, he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism, as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society in free lectures delivered at Kelmscott House, the home of William Morris.

He was also among the founders of the Science School Journal, a school magazine that allowed him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction.

A precursor to his novel, The Time Machine, was published in the Journal under the title The Chronic Argonauts.

The school year 1886 to 1887 was the last year of his studies.

During 1888 well stayed in Stoke on Trent, living in Basford.

The unique environment of the Potteries was certainly an inspiration.

He wrote in a letter to a friend from the area that the distinct made an immense impression on me.

The inspiration for some of his descriptions in The War of the World is thought to have come from his short time spent here, seeing the iron Foundry furnaces burn over the city, shooting huge red light into the skies.

His stay in the pottery has also resulted in the macabre short story The Cone, contemporarious with his famous The Time Machine, set in the north of the city.

After teaching for some time, he was briefly on the staff of Holt Academy in Wales.

Wales found it necessary to supplement his knowledge relating to educational principles and methodology and entered the College of College of Teachers.

He later received his license, Height and Fellowship FCP diplomas from the College.

It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London External Program.

In 1889 to 1890 he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School in London, where he taught A.

Aa Milne, whose father ran the school.

His first published work was A Textbook of Biology in two volumes.

Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wales was left without a source of income.

His aunt Mary, his father's sister Inlaw, invited him to stay with her for a while, which solved his immediate problem of accommodation.

During his stay at his aunt's residence, he grew increasingly interested in her daughter Isabelle, whom he later courted to earn money.

He began writing short, humorous articles for journals such as the Paul Mall Gazette, later collecting these in volume form as select conversations with an uncle and certain personal matters.

So prolific did Wells become at this mode of journalism that many of his early pieces remain unidentified.

According to David C.

Smith, most of Wells occasional pieces have not been collected and many have not even been identified as his.

Wells did not automatically receive the byline his reputation demanded until after 1896 or so.

As a result, many of his early pieces are unknown.

It is obvious that many early Wells items have been lost.

His success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to write book length work, and he published his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895.

In 1891, Wells married his cousin, Isabel Mary Wellsabel Mary Smith.

The couple agreed to separate in 1894 when he had fallen in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, later known as Jane, with whom he moved to Woking, Surrey, in May 1895.

They lived in a rented house, Lenton, now number 141 Maybury Road, in the town center for just under 18 months and married at St.

Peter's Register Office in October 1895.

His short period in Woking was perhaps the most creative and productive of his whole writing career, for while there he planned and wrote The World of the Worlds and the Time Machine, completed The Island of Dr.

Moreau, wrote and published The Wonderful Visit and The Wheels of Chance, and began writing two other early books, When The Sleeper Wakes and Love and Mr.

Lewis Him.

In late summer 1896, Wells and Jane moved to a larger house in Rochester Park, near Kingston upon themes for two years.

This lasted until his poor health took them to Sandgate, near Falkenstone, where he constructed a large family home, Spade House, in 19 one.

He had two sons with Jane, George Phillip, known as Jip, and Frank Richard, grandfather of film director Simon Wells.

Jane died on October 6, 1927, in Duno at the age of 55.

Wells had affairs with a significant number of women.

In December 19, nine.

He had a daughter, Anna Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, had met through the Fabian Society.

Amber had married the barrister Gr Blanco White in July of that year as coarranged by Wells.

After Beatrice Webb voiced disapproval of Wells'sword and intrigue with Amber, he responded by lampooning Beatrice Webb and her husband Sidney Webb, in his 1911 novel The New Makia Valley, as Altoria and Oscar Bailey, a pair of shortsighted burglar Manipulators.

Between 1910 and 1913, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim was one of his mistresses.

In 1914 he had a son, Anthony West, by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, 26 years his junior, in 1920 to 1921, and intermittently until his death, he had a love affair with the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger.

Between 1924 and 1933 he partnered with the 22 year younger Dutch adventurer and writer Odette Kuhn, for whom he lived in Lou Padot, a house they built together in grassy France, whilst dedicated his longest book to her, The World of William Cliff.

When visiting Maxim Gorky in Russia, he had slept with Gorky's mistress, Mora Budburg, then still Countess Benkhuddorf and 27 years his junior.

In 1933, when she left Gorky and immigrated to London, the relationship renewed and she cared for him.

Through his final illness, Wells repeatedly asked her to marry him, but Budburg strongly rejected his proposals.

In Experiment in autobiography 1934, Wells wrote, I was never a great Amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.

David Lodge's novel A Man of Parts 2011 a narrative based on factual sources authors Note, gives a convincing and generally sympathetic account of Welles's relations with the women mentioned above and others.

Director Simon Wells, the author's great grandson, was a consultant on the future scenes in Back to the Future Part Two.

One of the ways that Wells expressed himself was through his drawings and sketches.

One common location for these was the endpaperss and title pages of his own diaries, and they covered a wide variety of topics, from political commentary to his feelings toward his literary contemporaries.

And his current romantic interests.

During his marriage to Amy Catherine, whom he nicknamed Jane, he drew a considerable number of pictures, many of them being overt comments on their marriage.

During this period.

He called these pictures pixelas.

These pic schwa have been the topic of study by well scholars for many years, and in 2006 a book was published on the subject.

Some of his early novels, called Scientific Romances, invented several themes, now classic and science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Island of Dr.

Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, when the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon.

He also wrote realistic novels that received critical acclaim, including Tips and a critique of English culture during the Edwardian period, Tono Bongue.

Wells also wrote dozens of short stories and novellas, including The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, which helped bring the full impact of Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public and was followed by many later successes, such as The Country of the Blind.

According to James E.

Gunn, one of Wells major contributions to the science fiction genre was his approach, which he referred to as his new system of ideas.

In his opinion, the author should always strive to make the story as credible as possible, even if both the writer and the reader knew certain elements are impossible, allowing the reader to accept the ideas as something that could really happen today referred to as the plausible impossible and suspension of disbelief.

While neither invisibility nor time travel was new in speculative fiction, Wells added a sense of realism to the concepts which the readers were not familiar with.

He conceived the idea of using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively forwards or backwards in time.

The term time machine, coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle.

He explained that while riding the time machine, he realized that the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting and the circumstances in which I now set the time traveler were all that I could imagine of solid upperclass comforts in Wells's law, a science fiction story should contain only a single extraordinary assumption.

Therefore, as justifications for the impossible, he employed scientific ideas and theories.

Wells best known statement of the law appears in his introduction to a collection of his works published in 1934.

As soon as the magic trick has been done, the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real.

Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis.

Any extra fantasy outside the Cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention.

Dr.

Griffin, or The Invisible Man, is a brilliant research scientist who discovers a method of invisibility but finds himself unable to reverse the process.

An enthusiast of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction, the island of Dr.

Moreau sees a shipwrecked man left on the island home of Dr.

Moreau, a mad scientist who creates humanlike hybrid beings from animals via vivisection.

The earliest depiction of Uplift, the novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature.

In the first Men in the Moon, Wells used the idea of radio communication between astronomical objects, a plot point inspired in Nikola Tesla's claim that he had received radio signals from Mars.

Though Tono Bungay is not a science fiction novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in it.

Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in the world.

Set Free, this book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic hit with the first description of a nuclear weapon.

Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years.

The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge.

Wells's novel revolves around an unspecified invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosives, but which continue to explode for days on end.

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier 20th century, he wrote then the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible, but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst into their fumbling hands in 1932.

The physicist and conceiver of nuclear chain reaction, Leo Sitsler read The World Sets Free.

The same year Sir James Chadwick discovered The Neutron, a book which he said made a great impression on him.

In addition to writing early science fiction, he produced work dealing with mythological beings like an angel in the novel The Wonderful Visit and a Mermaid in the novel The Sea Lady, Wells also wrote nonfiction.

His first nonfiction bestseller was Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and Thoughts.

When originally serialized in a magazine, it was subtitled An Experiment in Prophecy, and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work.

It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society.

Continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able rather than the traditional upper classes as leaders.

Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits trains and cars, resulting in the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs, moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom, the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union and its misses.

He did not expect successful aircraft before 1950 and averred that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and found her at sea.

His best selling twovolume work, The Outline of history began a new era of popularized world history.

It received a mixed critical response from professional historians.

However, it was very popular amongst the general population and made Wells a rich man.

Many other authors followed with outlines of their own in other subjects.

He reprised his outline in 1922 with a much shorter, popular work, A Short History of the World, a history book praised by Albert Einstein and two long The Science of Life, written with his son G.

P.

Wells and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, and the work wealth and Happiness of Mankind.

The outlines became sufficiently common for James Thurber to parody the trend in his humorous essay and Outline of Scientists.

Indeed, Wells's Outline of History remains in print with the new 2005 edition, while A Short History of the World has been re edited 2006.

From quite early in Wells career, he sought a better way to organize society and wrote a number of utopian novels.

The first of these was A Modern Utopia, which shows a worldwide utopia with no imports but meteorites and no exports at all.

Two travelers from our world fall into its alternate history.

The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe until people realize a better way of living, whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally and abandoning a European war in the days of the comet, or a world Council of scientists taking over as In The Shape of Things to Come, which he later adapted for the 1936 Alexander Corda film Things to Come.

This depicted all too accurately the impending world war, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs.

He also portrayed the rise of the fastest dictators in the autocracy of Mr.

Parham and the Holy Terror.

Men Like Gods is also a utopian novel.

Wells, in this period was regarded as an enormously influential figure.

The critic Malcolm Callie stated, by the time he was 40, his influence was wider than any other living English writer.

Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as The First Men in the Moon, where nature is completely suppressed by nurture, and The Island of Dr.

Moreau, where the strong presence of nature represents a threat to civilized society.

Not all his scientific romances ended in a utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, When The Sleep Awakes, 1899, rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes, which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers.

The island of Dr.

Moreau is even darker.

The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals, vivisected unsuccessfully into human beings, eventually returns to England like Goliver.

On his return from the Hunahims, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilized beasts slowly reverting to their animal natures.

Wells also wrote the preface for the first edition of Wn.

P.

Barbellian's diaries, the Journal of a Disappointed Man, published in 1919.

Since Barbellion was the real author's pen name, many reviewers believe Welles to have been the true author of the Journal.

Wells always denied this, despite being full of praise for the diaries.

In 1927, a Canadian teacher and writer, Florence Deeks, unsuccessfully sued Wells for infringement of Copyright and breach of trust, claiming that much of the Outline of History had been plagiarized from her unpublished manuscript, The Web of the World's Romance, which had spent nearly nine months in the hands of Wells's Canadian publisher, Macmillan Canada.

However, it was sworn on oath at the trial that the manuscript remained in Toronto in the safekeeping of Macmillan, and that Wells did not even know it existed, let alone had seen it.

The court found no proof of copying and decided the similarities were due to the fact that the books had similar nature and both writers had access to the same sources.

In 2000, AB McKillop, a professor of history at Carleton University, produced a book on the case, The Spencer and the Prophet Florence Dicks HG.

Wells and the Mystery of the Perloined Past.

According to McCallup, the lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the prejudice against a woman suing a Wellknown and famous male author, and he paints a detailed story based on the circumstantial evidence of the case.

In 2004, Dennis N.

Magnusson, Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Law, Queen's University, Ontario, published an article on Deeks v.

Wells.

This reexamines the case in relation to McCullough's book.

While having some sympathy for Deeks, he argues that she had a weak case that was not well presented, and though she may have been met with sexism from her lawyers, she received a fair trial, adding that the law applied is essentially the same law that would be applied to a similar case today.

In 1933, Wells predicted in the shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin in January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true four months early in September 1839.

With the outbreak of World War II.

In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing world encyclopedia to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being.

In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future Organization of Knowledge and Education World Brain, including the essay The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia.

Prior to 1933, Wells's books were widely read in Germany and Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated shortly after publication.

By 1933, he had attracted the attention of German officials because of his criticism of the political situation in Germany, and on May 10, 1933, Wells's books were burned by the N*** youth in Berlin's.

Omniplats, and his works were banned from libraries and bookstores.

Wells, as President of Penn International Poets, essayists novelists anchored by the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German Penn Club from the international body.

In 1934, following the German Penn's refusal to admit Nonarian writers to its membership at a Penn conference in Rugosa, Wales refused to yield to N*** sympathizers, who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking.

Near the end of World War II, Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists of people slated for immediate arrest during the invasion of Britain in the abandoned Operation Sea Lion, with Wells included in the alphabetical list of the black Book.

Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells wrote Floor Games, followed by Little Wars, which set out rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers.

Miniatures a pacifist prior to the First World War, well stated, how much better is this amiable miniature war than the real thing?

According to Wells, the idea of the game developed from a visit by his friend Jerome K.

Jerome.

After dinner, Jerome began shooting down toy soldiers with a toy Cannon, and Wells joined in to compete.

During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, Wells published a number of articles in London newspapers that subsequently appeared as a book entitled The War That Will End War.

He coined the expression with the idealistic belief that the result of the war would make a future conflict impossible.

Wells blamed the Central Powers for the coming of the war and argued that only the defeat of German militarism could bring about an end to the war.

Wells used the shorter form of the phrase The War to End War in the fourth year, in which he noted that the phrase got into circulation in the second half of 1914.

In fact, it had become one of the most common catchphrases of the war.

In 1918, Wells worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau, also called Wellington House.

Wells was also one of 53 leading British authors, a number that included Redgard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who signed their names to the author's declaration.

This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime and that Britain could not, without dishonor, have refused to take part in the present war.

Wells visited Russia three times night four.

During his second visit, he saw his old friend Maxim Gorky and, with Gorky's help, met Vladimir Linen.

In his book Russia in the Shadows, Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organization.

On July 23, 1934, after visiting US President Franklin D.

Roosevelt, Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for 3 hours for the New Statesman magazine, which was extremely rare at that time.

He told Stalin how he had seen the happy faces of healthy people in contrast with his previous visit to Moscow in 20.

However, he also criticized the lawlessness class discrimination, state violence, and absence of free expression.

Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly.

As the chairman of the Londonbased Penn International, which protected the rights of authors to write without being intimidated.

Wells hoped by his trip to USSR he could win Stalin over by force of argument.

Before he left, he realized that no reform was to happen in the near future.

Wells'greatest literary output occurred before the First World War, which was lamented by younger authors whom he had influenced.

In this connection, George Orwell described Wells as too sane to understand the modern world, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper Dragons.

G.

K.

Chesterson Quipped Mr.

Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message.

Wells had diabetes and was a cofounder in 1934 of the Diabetic Association, now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK.

On October 28, 1940, on the radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Wells, who two years previously had performed a famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.

During the interview by Charles C.

Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells admitted his surprise at the sensation that resulted from the broadcast, but acknowledged his debt to Wells for increasing sales of one of his more obscure titles.

Wells died of unspecified causes on August 13, 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regents Park, London.

In his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be I told you so, you damned fools.

Wells body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on August 16, 1946.

His Ashes were subsequently scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks, the most Eastern point of the Jurassic Coast and about three.

5 miles five.

6 km from Swanage endorsed at.

A commemorative blue plaque in his honor was installed by the Greater London Council at his home in Regents Park in 1966.

A futurist and visionary, Wells foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and something resembling the World Wide Web, asserting that Wells visions of the future remain unsurpassed.

John Higgs, author of Stranger than We Can Imagine, Making Sense of the 20th Century, States that in the late 19th century Wells saw the coming century clearer than anyone else.

He anticipated wars in the air, the sexual revolution, motorized transport causing the growth of suburbs, and a proto Wikipedia he called the world brain.

In his novel The World Set Free, he imagined an atomic bomb of terrifying power that would be dropped from airplanes.

This was an extraordinary insight for an author writing in 1913, and it made a deep impression on Winston Churchill.

Many readers have hailed H.

G.

Wells and George Orwell as special kinds of writers, ones endowed with remarkable prescriptive and prophetic powers.

Wells was the 20th century prototype of this literary Vatic figure.

He invented the role, explored its possibilities, especially through new forms of prose and new ways to publish and define its boundaries.

His impact on his culture was profound.

As George Orwell wrote, the minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.

The Author as cultural hero H.

G.

Wells and George Orwell In 2011, Wells was among a group of science fiction writers featured in the Profits of Science Fiction Series, a show produced and hosted by film director Sir Ridley Scott, which depicts how predictions influence the development of scientific advancements by inspiring many readers to assist in transforming those futuristic visions into everyday reality.

In a 2013 review of The Time Machine for The New Yorker magazine, Brad Lethiser writes, at the base of Wells'great visionary exploit is this rational, ultimately scientific attempt to tease out the potential future consequences of present conditions, not as they might arise in a few years or even decades, but millennia hints, epoch hints.

He is world literatures great extrapolator.

Like no other fiction writer before him, he embraced deep time.

Wells was a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society.

Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells's books, and after they first met in 1902, they kept in touch until Wells died in 1946.

As a junior Minister, Churchill borrowed lines from Wells for one of his most famous early landmark speeches in 1906 and as Prime Minister.

The phrase the gathering storm used by Churchill to describe the rise of N*** Germany had been written by Wells in The War of the Worlds, which depicts an attack on Britain by Martians.

Wells's extensive writings on equality and human rights, most notably his most influential work, The Rights of man, laid the groundwork for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after his death.

His efforts regarding the League of nations, on which he collaborated on the project with Leonard Wolfe, with the booklets the idea of a League of nations proligumina to the study of world organization and the way of the League of nations became a disappointment as the organization turned out to be a weak one, unable to prevent the Second World War, which itself occurred towards the very end of his life, and only increased the pessimistic side of his nature.

In his last book, Mind, at the end of its tutor, he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea.

He referred to the era between the two world wars as the Age of Frustration.

Wells views on God and religion changed over his lifetime.

Early in his life, he distanced himself from Christianity and later from theism and finally, late in life, he was essentially atheistic.

Martin Gardner summarizes this progression.

The younger Wells did not object to using the word God, provided it did not imply anything resembling human personality.

In his middle years, Wells went through a phase of defending the concept of a finite God, similar to the God of such processed theologians as Samuel Alexander, Edgar Brightman, and Charles Hearthstone.

He even wrote a book about it called God the Invisible King.

Later, Wells decided he was really an atheist.

In Got The Invisible King, Wells wrote that his idea of God did not draw upon the traditional religions of the world.

The book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer, which is a profound belief in a personal and intimate God.

Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by speaking of one of them as God is nature or the Creator, and the other one as God is Christ or the Redeemer one is the great outward God, the other is the inmost God.

The first idea was perhaps developed most highly and completely in The God of Spinoza.

It is a conception of God tending to pantheism to an idea of comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection to a conception of aloofness and awe striking worshipfulness.

The second idea, which is contradictory to this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart.

The writer suggested that the great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilization and world unity which produced Christianity was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus.

Later in the work he aligns himself with a renacent or modern religion, neither atheist nor Buddhist, nor Mohammedian nor Christian that he has found growing up in himself of Christianity, he said, it is not now true for me.

Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother.

But if systemically I called myself a Christian.

I feel that to most men I should imply too much and so tell a lie.

Of other world religions, he writes, all these religions are true for me as Catebory Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing.

There they are, and they have served a purpose.

They have worked only.

They are not true for me to live in them.

They do not work for me.

In the fate of H*** sapiens, Wells criticized almost all world religions and philosophies, stating, There is no Creed, no way of living left in the world at all that really meets the needs of the time when we come to look at them coolly and dispassionately.

All the main religions patriotic, moral, and customary systems in which human beings are sheltering today appear to be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement, like the houses and palaces and other buildings of some vast, sprawling city overtaken by a landslide.

Wells opposition to organized religion reached a fever pitch in 1943 with publication of his book Crux and SADA Subtitled, An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church.

The science fiction historian John Clout describes Wells as the most important writer the genre has yet seen and notes.

His work has been central to both British and American science fiction.

Science fiction author and critic Algas Booters said Wells remains the outstanding Expositor of both the hope and the despair which are embodied in the technology and which are the major facts of life in our world.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 932, 1935, and 1946.

Well so influenced real exploration of space that an impact crater on Mars and the moon was named after him.

Wells's genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air.

Originality was Wells's calling card.

In a six year stretch from 1895 to one, he produced a stream of what he called scientific romance novels, which included The Time Machine, The Island of Dr.

Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon.

This was a dazzling display of new thoughts endlessly copied since a book like The War of the World inspired every one of the thousands of alien invasion stories that followed.

It burned its way into the psyche of mankind and changed us all forever.

Cultural historian John Higgs, The Guardian in the United Kingdom.

Wells's work was a key model for the British scientific romance, and other writers in that mode, such as Olof Stableden, J.

D.

Berrisford, S.

Fowler Wright, and Naomi Mitchison, all drew on Wells'example.

Wells was also an important influence on British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C.

Clarke and Brian Aldis expressing strong admiration for Wells's work.

Among contemporary British science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter, Christopher Priest, and Adam Roberts have all acknowledged Wells influence on their writing.

All three are vice presidents of the HGL Society.

He also had a strong influence on British scientists J-B-S.

Haldane, who wrote Dale Dus or Science and the Future, the Last Judgment, and On Being the Right Size, from the essay collection Possible Worlds and Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next 100 Years, which are speculations about the future of human evolution and life on other planets.

Haldane gave several lectures about these topics, which in turn influenced other science fiction writers in the United States.

Hugo Journe's Back reprinted most of Wells'work in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, regarding Welles'work as texts of central importance to the selfconscious new genre.

Later American writers such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Almswov, Frank Herbert, and Carl Sagan and Ursula K.

Lee Gwyn are recalled being influenced by Wells.

Sinclair Lewis's early novels were strongly influenced by Wells'realistic social novels, such as The History of Mr.

Polly.

Louis also named his first son Wells, after the author.

Lewis nominated HG.

Wells for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

In an interview with the Paris Review, Vladimir Nabokov described Wells as his favorite writer when he was a boy and a great artist.

He went on to cite the passionate friends Anne Veronica The Time Machine and the country of the Blind as superior to anything else written by Wells's British contemporaries.

Nabokov said.

His sociological cognitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasies are superb.

Jorge Louis Borges wrote many short pieces on Wells in which he demonstrates a deep familiarity with much of Wells's work.

While Borgas wrote several critical reviews, including a mostly negative review of Welles'film Things to Come, he regularly treated Wells as a canonical figure of fantastic literature.

Late in his life, Borgis included The Invisible Man and The Time Machine in his Prologue to a Personal Library, a curated list of 100 great works of literature that he undertook at the behest of the Argentine publishing house Emmessy.

Canadian author Margaret Atwood read Wells his books, and he also inspired writers of European speculative fiction such as Carol Kpak and Yevengi Zemayatin.

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