H.G. WELLS SEES IT THROUGH
By Charles Keller
HG Wells Society
The influence of H.G. Wells remains with us to this day. His literary blockbusters “The War of the Worlds, “The Time Machine, “The Invisible Man, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” and “The First Men in the Moon” are made into major motion pictures every few years, and his name is often invoked by journalists when describing some Wellsian-sounding piece of technology or story of a new discovery by Mars rovers.
Wells believed the keys to mankind’s long-term survival were education and a disciplined application of science that would benefit all mankind. To him life was a race between “education and catastrophe” and his fiction reflected this devotion to educating ‘Mr Everyman.’
Wells anticipated many things that would later become reality such as tanks, air travel and aerial warfare, suburban sprawl, and even the popularity of the automobile.
Just a month before the start of the Great War, Wells published “The World Set Free,” a novel that predicted a devastating world war with Germany, and a new weapon he called an “atomic bomb.” In fact the phrase we still closely associate with the First World War, “The War That Will End (All) Wars” was derived from title of his 1914 pamphlet addressing British pacifists and anti-war activists. Wells personally toured two fronts of the Great War during 1916. The experience had a profound effect on him and inspired him to make significant contributions to the Allied cause, which included service in Lord Northcliffe’s propaganda ministry.
H.G. Wells “thought globally” before it was fashionable. For him nationalism and the private arms trade presented the greatest dangers to peace. Devoted readers are used to him destroying the world in a variety of ways - and of course it never happened without a reason. Most often it was intended to give mankind an opportunity to reorganize the world’s affairs in a way that would insure permanent peace.
He struggled to maintain his optimism during the 1930’s as a new wave of nationalism spread from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy to Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic where the Nazi party was making political inroads. The Nazis were well aware of Wells’s work during the Great War and branded him as “anti-German.” His books were among those “verboten” works tossed into bonfires at German Universities in the 1930s.
Wells was among the first to call for a League of Nations during the First World War, and his pioneering work on what he called “The Universal Rights of Man” helped inspire many aspects of the United Nation’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
H.G. Wells died at home in August 1946.
This work is posted here by kind permission of Charles Keller and may not be reproduced elsewhere, in any form, without permission.