HG WELLS
If Edwardian Britain was slowly emerging from Victoria's long reign and unsure of its new, developing identity, the writer HG Wells was already gazing far into the future. For while his nonfiction output was impressively prolific, it was his science fiction novels that made Wells his name, foretelling of future 20th-century developments such as space travel and nuclear bombs.
In both his fiction and non-fiction, Wells investigated contemporary social problems and ills, deliberating on the means with which to cure them. A futurist and utopian, novels like 1905's A Modern Utopia attempted to provide a framework for a new way of living. Other works speculated on notions such as time travel (The Time Machine) and alien invasions (The War of the Worlds).
After the gritty social realism of Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens, such flights of
