We sometimes forget that there was a science fiction writer (besides Jules Verne) who was "old school" before the Golden Age of science fiction.
This article reminded me that H.G. Wells was that and more. He was:
Feminist. Socialist. Pacifist. Non-Monogamist. Utopian. Campaigner against racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism.
Like many of the great men of that age, he was also a royal bastard who mistreated women, egged on Nazi ideas of eugenics and may have been partially responsible Harry Houdini's death.
First, the good bits:
In a short span of six years at the turn of the century when the Western world was choked with coal smog, open sewers and horse manure, Wells churned out wildly imaginative works that literally invented many of the genres of science fiction:
- 1895: Time Travel - The Time Machine
- 1896: Bio-Hacking - The Island of Doctor Moreau
- 1897: Enhanced Humans - The Invisible Man
- 1898: Alien Invasion - The War of the Worlds
- 1901: Space Travel, First Contact - The First Men in the Moon
To this list I'd add to this list 1899's When the Sleeper Wakes where Wells extrapolated such an astonishing number of ideas and inventions that you'd have to at least consider whether he himself was an actual time traveler. In this novel of a man who wakes up in the future, Wells describes:
- Everyday air travel
- A 3D printer for clothes
- A DVD player (sort of), a television with cartridges for viewing news, entertainment and educational programs
Remarkably, for a guy that imagined the most horribly monstrous weapons of war, he was at heart a pacifist. Yet, he also was largely responsible for the popularization of war games. Single-handedly, he introduced the non-military public to large-scale strategy games with miniatures. Why would a pacifist do that? He laid out his reasons pretty clearly:
You have only to play at [games of war] three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion.
Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and [war games] bring you to it as nothing else.Now the dark side
Was H. G. Wells a visionary? No doubt. Still, the man was no saint or intellectual god of rationalism.
As pointed out by @joatsbuddy in a comment:
[Wells] was a tom-catting bastard who used the ideology of “free love” as an excuse for being extremely selfish.
In his wildly successful non-fiction bestseller ANTICIPATIONS, his outline of his ideal future world-state ... scientist-engineer rulers of his World State will engage in “mercy killing” of the “unfit” [including] blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people ... [who should] die out and disappear.In short, in his 30's Wells was a staunch believer in the deliberate "perfection" of the human race and believed that while the enlightened leaders of the future might be reluctant to control their populations with pain (such a shame), they will hold no superstitions about using "the method of death" to scientifically improve society. Many critics believe that these ideas helped fuel some of the "scientific" fascism and racism infested Europe leading up the World War II.
Having unleashed that cultural virus on the world in 1901, Wells did eventually renounce most of these ideas, advocating against anti-Semitism and for civil rights for blacks. Still, you'd think that a man of vision and grand ideas would have understood better than anybody how bad ideas backed by authority and "reason" could gain a dark momentum of their own that even their own author couldn't hold back.
Finally, toward the end of his life Wells and his wife became obsessed with the greatest hokum of his day, Spiritualism. They helped elevate the reputations of spiritual mediums to celebrity status. Some biographers suggest that when his former friend, Houdini, mounted a lifelong campaign to expose all spiritual mediums as money-sucking charlatans, Wells essentially hired a thug to rough him up, resulting in Houdini's death.
So, H. G. Wells was a giant of imagination who's visions exerted a huge and lasting influence (both good and bad) on the 20th century and helped shape the future in so many ways. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise anymore that pioneers make mistakes, sometimes nasty ones. Jefferson, Churchill, MLK were all flawed men who sometimes wore dirty boots but took great strides that we can admire anyway.
