Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
taking an incredible journey, not, you know,
across space or into some terrifying future,
but straight into the mind of the man who, perhaps
more than any other writer, shaped the 20th century
before it even arrived. That's right. We are
diving deep into the life, the predictions and
the magnificent contradictions of H .G. Wells.
And when most people hear that name, H .G. Wells,
they immediately think of his towering scientific
romances. You know, The Time Machine, The War
of the Worlds, The Invisible Man. Of course.
And they tend to pigeonhole him as simply the
father of science fiction. But that label, I
mean, while it's accurate, it's just far too
narrow. It really is. Our mission today is to
understand how we transcended that. We're investigating
Wells the novelist, of course, but also Wells
the relentless journalist, the ambitious historian,
the revolutionary futurist, and crucially, the
social critic whose ideas really laid the groundwork
for modern international law. I think the surprise
for you, our listener, is just how much this
man got right and how profoundly his vision actually
impacted reality. It's so easy to focus on, you
know, the Martians and the time travel. But the
deeper truth is that Wells was operating on a
principle that married the fantastic to the mundane.
And it's that balance that gave his work its
incredible predictive power. That tension, as
you put it, that is the absolute core of his
genius. He's sometimes called the father of science
fiction, a title he shares, of course, with Jules
Verne and Hugo Gernsback. Right. But Wells distinguished
himself by codifying his approach into something
literary critics now call Wells' Law. OK, let's
unpack this concept of Wells' Law, because this
really feels like the fundamental intellectual
engine of all his fiction. It's simple, but it's
brilliant. The law states that a science fiction
story must contain only a single extraordinary
assumption. Just one. Just one. Think of it as
a single impossible what -if. And once you introduce
that one fantastic element, be it a time machine,
an invisibility serum, a Martian invasion, the
writer must then ensure that everything else,
and this is his phrase, remains human and real.
So you ground the impossible in the completely
familiar. Exactly. He insisted on using touches
of prosaic detail, and rigorous adherence to
the hypothesis to make the impossible feel plausible.
This is what made his stories feel like tomorrow's
newspaper rather than, you know, some pure fantasy.
It grounds the experience. And it's why a writer
like Joseph Conrad, who was so deeply committed
to realism, could still hail Wells as, and I
love this quote, a realist of the fantastic.
And Wells' early training, which I know we'll
get to, gave him the technical chops to make
this plausible. And the payoff was just monumental.
We're not just talking about literary fame. We're
talking about real world influence on things
like. like tanks and space travel, nuclear weapons,
and even the existence of satellite television.
And perhaps most astonishingly, his ideas profoundly
influenced major political figures, people like
Winston Churchill, and later provided the actual
philosophical groundwork for the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. It's an extraordinary
output for a man who began life struggling just
to eat. To truly understand the global visionary,
we have to look at the poverty and the intellectual
struggle that forged him. Okay, let's start right
at the beginning. Herbert George Wells, born
in Bromley, Kent in 1866, he truly did come from
the most humble origins. This was not a comfortable
middle -class upbringing. Not at all. His father,
Joseph Wells, was a former gardener and a professional
cricketer for the Kent County team. And that
cricket money was supposed to supplement the
meager income from a failing shop they owned.
What kind of shop was it? It was a little shop
selling old china and sporting goods. But the
family's financial situation was always thin,
always unsteady. The shop struggled mainly because,
well, the location was poor and the inventory
itself was old and worn out. So constant precariousness.
Constant. And that defined Wells' childhood.
The situation got dramatically worse in 1877
when his father broke his femur. That injury
ended Joseph's cricket career completely and
cut off their most reliable stream of income.
Wow. And yet it seems like adversity often creates
opportunity. Out of this low point came this
defining incident that perhaps saved him. In
1874, young Bertie, as they called him, suffered
his own injury. A broken leg. He was confined
to his bed, and his father, to keep him occupied,
brought him a steady stream of books from the
local library. And that was it. The spark. That
reading experience was a seismic shift. Wells
later described how these books stimulated his
desire to write and transported him to other
worlds and lives. It was his escape hatch, mentally
and spiritually, from the grinding reality of
his childhood. And that grinding reality also
included a highly turbulent home life, right?
Oh, very. His mother, Sarah, was a devout Protestant.
His father was an avowed free thinker. They argued
constantly about religion and everything else.
Eventually, they had to live separate lives,
so they did remain married. And Wells himself
suffered under the economic necessity of the
time. He was shuttled into a series of these
deeply unhappy, failed apprenticeships. Yes,
the most notorious of which was his time as a
draper's apprentice at Highs in Southsea. This
was from 1880 to 1883. This sounds absolutely
Dickensian. I mean, 13 -hour workdays, sleeping
communally in a dormitory with other apprentices.
This must have been sheer misery for him. It
was essentially indentured servitude. And the
key takeaway here is that these experiences weren't
just biographical details. They directly fueled
his social criticism. When he moved into his
realist phase later on, those memories directly
inspired his novels of lower middle class English
life. Like Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly.
Exactly. Kipps came out in 1905, Mr. Polly in
1910. These books are incredibly sharp, humane
critiques of the class system that had nearly
trapped him. But he found a second escape route,
not just through fiction, but through this aggressive
self -education. While his mother was working
as a housekeeper at a manor called Upp Park,
Wells gained access to its magnificent library.
This was the real turning point. From apprentice
to intellectual, he spent hours immersed in classic
works, reading Plato's Republic and, perhaps
most formative for his later career, Thomas More's
Utopia. So he's reading the foundational texts
on ideal societies. Right. And this foundational
exposure to political philosophy and the structure
of ideal societies gave his later science fiction
its heavy intellectual weight. He wasn't just
making up monsters. He was. designing societies.
And this self -driven academic rigor, it paid
off. In 1884, he won a scholarship to the Normal
School of Science, which is now the Royal College
of Science in London. And there he studied biology
under the great intellectual champion of Darwinism,
Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was famously known
as Darwin's bulldog. And this mentorship was
absolutely crucial. It deeply influenced Wells'
later ethical and social thinking, embedding
his entire worldview firmly within a Darwinian
evolutionary context. So he wasn't just writing
about the future. No, he was writing about the
evolutionary endpoints of humanity and civilization.
This is the intellectual engine behind the Eloi
and the Morlocks in the time machine. That idea
that society splits into separate, specialized,
almost non -human species based entirely on economic
class. Exactly. It's a chilling warning about
Victorian class structure disguised as an adventure
story. So his fantastical worlds are essentially
biological extrapolations of Victorian class
struggle. That's a powerful connection. Yet despite
this intellectual ascent, he was still physically
suffering. He received a comfortable allowance
of a guinea a week, 21 shillings, which should
have placed him far above poverty. It really
should have. Many working class families at the
time were living on about a pound a week for
all their expenses. But Wells recorded in his
own diaries that he was constantly hungry and
was visibly malnourished. So what was happening
there? It's profound sociological contradiction.
He had the opportunity and the funds for social
mobility, but he was still psychologically and
physically suffering from the deprivation of
his childhood. He just couldn't shake that ingrained
poverty mindset, or maybe he just couldn't manage
his money effectively. But his academic output
was stellar? Oh, absolutely. Despite the hunger,
he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology
in 1890, and his very first substantial published
work wasn't a novel at all, but a serious, two
-volume textbook of biology in 1893. He was a
certified, disciplined scientist before he became
a literary star. And he started mixing that serious
study with early literary experiments almost
immediately. He was contributing humorous articles
to journals like the Pall Mall Gazette, mostly
as a necessary source of income after he left
the science school. He was also actively engaging
with the scientific community. He was among the
founders of something called the Science School
Journal. And it was there in 1888 that he published
a story called The Chronic Argonauts. And that's
the precursor. That is the clear, rough draft
precursor to the time machine. The foundations
for his defining work were being laid while he
was still navigating the science world. And the
industrial world, too. He had a brief stay in
Stoke -on -Trent, which was known as the Potteries,
in 1888, and he saw the iron foundry furnaces
burning constantly over the city. And that imagery,
that terrifying raw power of the Industrial Revolution,
is thought to have directly inspired the descriptions
of the catastrophic Martian machinery. and the
destruction you see later in the War of the Worlds.
So his worldview is this fantastic synthesis,
classical philosophy from the library, the raw
imagery of industrial England, rigorous biological
science from Huxley, and the lived experience
of poverty. That chaotic, rich mix is what gave
him the unique perspective to redefine literature.
That blend of the discipline in the raw industrial
is the perfect segue. We move now from the unhappy
apprentice and the hungry student to the genre
-defining titan. He enters this hyper -prolific
phase with an incredible six -year output between
1895 and 1901 that, I mean, it cemented his reputation
forever. This period is just defined by the practical
application of Wells' law. He moved beyond speculative
stories and created the modern paradigm of what
he called scientific romance. He understood that
readers of his era were scientifically literate
enough to follow complex thought experiments
as long as the emotional terrain was familiar.
So the goal was to force the reader to think
about the implications of the fantastic, not
just the adventure itself. Exactly. Let's break
down those pivotal scientific romances because
each one is a foundational text, starting with
a novel that literally created a new term for
the English language. The Time Machine. The Time
Machine, published in 1895, was his first true
success. And the key, as per Wells' law, was
that single extraordinary assumption, a vehicle
that allows an operator to travel purposefully
and selectively through time. And he coined the
term. He coined the term Time Machine, and the
concept became instantly ubiquitous. And the
realism is in the setting. He contrasts this
impossible vehicle, the very first example in
fiction, with the very solid upper -class comforts
at the time traveler's parlor and his dinner
party guests. But the real depth, as you said,
comes from his Darwinian training. Exactly. The
journey forward is this horrific projection of
social stratification. The human species has
split into the effete, surface -dwelling alloy.
Representing the final, useless extreme of the
leisured class. Right. And the subterranean,
cannibalistic Morlocks. who represent the brutalized
industrial working class. They are no longer
humans. They are distinct, separate evolutionary
products of Victorian society. It's a chilling
warning. Then came the quintessential alien invasion
story, The War of the Worlds in 1898. The sheer
cultural impact of this novel is just immeasurable.
It is the template for everything that followed.
Wells planned and wrote it while living in Woking,
Surrey between 1895 and 1896. And again, the
adherence to realism is key. He set the Martian
landings right there on Horstall Common. In his
own neighborhood. Right in his backyard. Using
these incredibly familiar, highly detailed English
landscapes as the backdrop for impossible devastation.
And beyond the terror, the story contains this
devastating social critique, doesn't it? The
Martians treat humans exactly the way Victorian,
Arab, British, and European colonizers treated
indigenous peoples across the globe. Precisely.
With utter indifference and superior firepower,
Wells turns the lens of imperialism back on the
British reader. The Martlins, in their merciless
use of the heat ray, are a dark reflection of
British military might and the casual cruelty
of colonial expansion suddenly brought home.
It's an exercise in empathy by catastrophe. That's
a great way to put it. Wells didn't just deal
with external threats. In 1896, he gave us the
island of Dr. Moreau, which is maybe his darkest
and most philosophical exploration of identity
and morality. Moreau is a visceral journey into
interference with nature. It explores these profound
ethical questions about pain, cruelty, and the
limits of human identity. Dr. Moreau is a scientist
creating human -like hybrid beast folk through
vivisection. A concept we now call uplift in
science fiction. That's right. And the narrative
tension comes from the beast folk desperately
trying to follow the law imposed upon them by
Moreau, which reflects the veneer of civilization
being imposed upon humanity itself. And the haunting
conclusion makes this explicit. It does. The
narrator escapes the horror of the island and
returns to England, but finds himself irreparably
damaged by the experience. He can no longer shake
the perception that his fellow humans are simply
barely civilized beasts prone to reverting to
their animal natures at any moment. So it's a
direct critique of the late Victorian faith and
social progress, suggesting that civilization
is just skin deep. Exactly. And cementing his
run of iconic figures, The Invisible Man, published
in 1897, introduces us to Dr. Griffin. He's the
brilliant but nihilistic research scientist who
successfully achieves invisibility, but then
discovers he cannot reverse the process. And
Griffin quickly descends into enthusiasm for
random, anonymous, and irresponsible violence.
He realizes the total moral and legal freedom
invisibility grants him. He embodies the danger
of science divorced from ethics. A cautionary
tale about technological power without moral
responsibility, and an iconic figure in horror
fiction. His run continued strong into the 20th
century with the first men in the moon in 1901.
Beyond the idea of cavorite, the fictional material
that negates gravity, allowing travel wells explores
astronomical communication. Yes, he featured
the idea of radio communication between astronomical
objects. And this was actually inspired by Nikola
Tesla's contemporaneous claims that he had received
mysterious radio signals from Mars. Wow. So he's
synthesizing cutting edge science in real time.
Always. and turning it into narrative. It's fitting
that the H .G. Wells crater on the far side of
the moon was named after him in 1970, confirming
his permanent place in space exploration history.
It is staggering that he achieved this dazzling
display of new thought in just six years, while
simultaneously finding commercial success in
genres far removed from science fiction, like
the realist novels we mentioned, Kipps and Mr.
Polley. Indeed, these realist novels were immensely
popular and well regarded for their accurate
and sympathetic depiction of the struggles of
the lower middle class. And at the same time,
he wrote mythological works like The Wonderful
Visit, which dealt with an angel. and the sea
lady featuring a mermaid. He was never content
to stay in one lane. But the reputation that
truly vaulted him into global influence, and
which we need to dive into now, is his role as
the futurist and prophet. He didn't just invent
concepts. He seemed to possess a crystal ball
for the political and technological catastrophes
of the 20th century. Without question, his most
dramatic and consequential prophetic hit is found
in the novel The World Set Free, published in
1914, right on the cusp of the First World War.
What's fascinating is that the book is dedicated
to Frederick Soddy, the chemist who proved the
existence of radioactive isotopes. So Wells was
reading the most complex theoretical science
of the day and immediately recognizing its potential
consequences. He was synthesizing knowledge that
others hadn't yet connected. And in this book,
he writes the first description of a weapon utilizing
accelerated radioactive decay. He termed it the
atomic bomb. And the mechanism he imagined was
chillingly specific. It was. Unlike the real
-world fission bomb, Wells' fictional bomb accelerated
the natural radioactive decay of elements, resulting
in explosions that were incredibly persistent,
managing to continue to explode for days. He
wrote a passage, didn't he? A remarkable one,
he wrote. Nothing could have been more obvious
to the people of the earlier 20th century than
the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible.
but they did not see it until the atomic bombs
burst in their fumbling hands. He saw the technological
capacity for self -destruction so clearly. This
wasn't just spooky foresight. This particular
piece of fiction had a direct and documented
real -world impact on the single most transformative
scientific project of the mid -20th century.
Absolutely crucial. In 1932, the Hungarian -American
physicist Leo Szilard, who would later become
one of the central figures in the Manhattan Project,
read The World Set Free. And Szilard was already
working on nuclear physics. He was. And in 1933,
he conceived the idea of a self -sustaining nuclear
chain reaction. And knowing the devastating military
potential, he assigned his patent for the chain
reaction to the British Admiralty to keep it
secret from the wider scientific community. Specifically
because of the book. Specifically. He stated
in his memoirs, knowing what a chain reaction
would mean, and I knew it because I had read
H .G. Wells, I did not want this patent to become
public. Wells' fiction provided the conceptual
vocabulary and the ethical imperative for the
men who built the actual bomb. That is just staggering
how quickly his fiction became blueprint. It's
unbelievable. Let's look now at his nonfiction
predictions. His 1901 work, Anticipations, detailed
the world he expected by the year 2000. It was
subtitled An Experiment in Prophecy. And the
hits are astonishing. He foresaw the advent of
aircraft, tanks, and crucially space travel,
and the development of something resembling satellite
television. But his most accurate sociological
prediction was based on transport. Tell me more
about that. He correctly predicted the revolutionary
effect of motorized transport. Wells argued that
the tyranny of the train line would end, enabling
people to live further away from their central
workplaces, which would lead to the rapid growth
of suburbs and commuter belts outside the crowded
cities. So he basically predicted suburban sprawl.
He did. He also predicted the defeat of German
militarism and even the existence of something
resembling a functional European Union. Yet the
profit wasn't infallible. The sources note some
famous, almost comical misses. Indeed. He was
right about aircraft existing, but thought they
wouldn't become truly successful or militarily
decisive until after 1950. And he famously asserted
that submarines would only suffocate its crew
and founder at sea. So it shows he was always
extrapolating based on the technology of his
day. Exactly. He wasn't divining future breakthroughs
out of thin air. His failures are as informative
as his successes. Where his extrapolations about
conflict were concerned, though, he was tragically
accurate. His 1933 work, The Shape of Things
to Come, predicted a global conflict beginning
in January 1940. Only four months off from the
actual outbreak of World War II in September
1939. And the novel accurately depicted cities
being systematically destroyed by aerial bombs,
which was a horrifying novelty at the time of
writing. He also recognized the rise of dangerous
political pathologies across Europe, portraying
fascist dictators with shocking clarity in novels
like The Autocracy of Mr. Parham and The Holy
Terror. Wells recognized that the political vacuum
created by the First World War allowed for the
rise of these charismatic, irrational, and highly
destructive strongmen. He analyzed that pathology
very effectively. Before these real cataclysmic
wars, however, Wells offered a safer miniature
alternative for aggressive impulses. He essentially
invented modern miniature wargaming. He did.
In Floor Games and Little Wars, he laid out complex
rules for moving infantry, cavalry, and artillery
across the living room carpet. The man who predicted
the atomic bomb was also essentially the great
-grandfather of every kid playing Warhammer in
a basement. That's a marvelous contradiction.
As a pacifist before World War I, he stated that
this game was... much better than the real thing,
calling it an amiable miniature alternative to
actual conflict. That deep compassion and desire
for a better system brings us to his role, not
just as a prophet of technology, but as a persistent
and relentless social critic and global thinker,
a role he actively prioritized in his later career.
His political stance was rooted deeply in the
British socialist movement. He was an outspoken
socialist from a young age and a prominent member
of the Fabian Society. And for our listener,
we should clarify that the Fabian Society wasn't
about sudden revolution. They were committed
to achieving socialism. gradually through intellectual
debate and parliamentary reform. Exactly. Rational
evolution, not sudden catastrophe. And Wells
was so committed to shaping the political future
that he even stood as a later party candidate
for London University in both the 1922 and 1923
general elections. He was a participant, not
just an observer. This political activism led
to fascinating and often strained relationships
with figures of the establishment, none more
intriguing than Winston Churchill, who was an
avid reader of Wells' books. Their relationship
went far beyond just social dining. Churchill
was profoundly influenced by Wells' ideas. Not
only did Churchill borrow specific dramatic lines,
famously using the phrase the gathering storm,
which Wells had used in the War of the Worlds,
to describe the rise of Nazi Germany. But the
influence ran deeper than that. Much deeper.
Policy influence. Wells' socialist ideas about
the support of state and national efficiency
directly influenced a famous 1906 speech by Churchill.
Churchill was adapting Wells' vision of government
intervention to help the working poor. And Churchill
acknowledged this. He did. He later wrote to
Wells, I owe you a great debt. Wells' imagination
provided intellectual ammunition for his most
powerful political opponents. It's fascinating.
Wells was ultimately driven by this powerful
utopian impulse, an overarching desire to outline
a rational, efficient, and just society. He devoted
several major works to this pursuit, starting
with A Modern Utopia in 1905. A Modern Utopia
envisioned a worldwide society with a standardized
system of knowledge and governance. And delightfully,
it had no imports but meteorites and no exports
at all, completely self -sufficient. And his
utopian solutions often involved some massive
global shift, like the mysterious gases. Yes,
exactly. In the days of the comet, mysterious
gases from the comet suddenly caused people to
behave rationally, abandoning a massive European
war. Or, in the showbiz things to come, a World
Council of Scientists takes over after a devastating
global war and guides humanity toward a peaceful,
technocratic future. So the recurring message
is that profound, often non -democratic societal
restructuring is necessary to escape humanity's
self -destructive tendencies. That's it. And
to educate the masses for this rational future,
Wells embarked on a massive historical project.
The Outline of History, published in 1920, was
a huge commercial success. It was revolutionary
because it democratized history, wasn't it? Absolutely.
It wasn't written for academics. It was a popularized
work of world history written from a secular
global perspective. It made him a rich man and
spurred many other authors to create their own
popular outlines of different subjects. He followed
that success quickly with A Short History of
the World in 1922, which was praised by Albert
Einstein. He truly saw himself as a global teacher.
And this commitment to universal knowledge culminated
in his most visionary and perhaps most relevant
concept to us today, the world brain. This feels
profoundly like a prediction of the Internet.
What exactly did he envision? In 1936, Wells
called for the compilation of a constantly growing
and changing world encyclopedia. This wasn't
just a big book. It had to be continually reviewed
by outstanding authorities, instantly accessible
to every human being globally. He expanded this
vision in his 1938 book, World Brain. The ultimate
repository of integrated, verifiable knowledge?
A system designed to overcome ignorance and misinformation.
Yet, despite this boundless optimism and his
dedication to global organization, he collaborated
on booklets supporting the League of Nations.
The political realities of the interwar period
seem to have deeply disillusioned him. They did.
The League of Nations proved too weak to prevent
the rise of fascism, disappointing him greatly.
He dubbed the entire interwar period the age
of frustration. His optimism finally shattered
toward the end of his life. And the ultimate
expression of that final dark turn came in his
last book. Mind at the End of Its Tether from
1945. It expressed a shocking deep pessimism.
Well suggested that humanity's story might simply
be over and that humanity being replaced by another
more rational species might not be a bad idea.
A bleak conclusion from the man who had spent
a lifetime pushing for human progress. Very bleak.
But before that final dark turn, his commitment
to a rational, ethical world state left an immense
political and legal legacy that persists today.
This is perhaps his most overlooked contribution.
His extensive writings on equality and human
rights, particularly his influential work The
Rights of Man from 1940, directly impacted foundational
international law. How did The Rights of Man
specifically influence the United Nations Charter?
Well, Wells didn't just write abstract philosophy.
He wrote a list of practical, actionable rights
he believed were essential for a functioning
global citizen. The right to nourishment, to
education, to legal aid, to protection from violence.
His texts circulated widely among policymakers
and intellectuals during the planning stages
of the post -war world order. So it was a direct
blueprint. It was. When the UN drafted the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Wells' detailed
framework emphasized... economic and social rights
alongside civil liberties laid essential groundwork.
So from a working class apprentice reading Plato's
Republic to helping define foundational international
human rights law, that is the staggering trajectory
of his influence. Now we have to explore the
controversies and complexities of the man himself
because H .G. Wells, the prophet of morality
and utopianism, was also a notably turbulent
and contradictory figure in his personal life.
He was a complicated and messy man. Wells had
multiple well -documented love affairs, often
overlapping, even while married to his second
wife, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed
Jane. He was openly progressive about sexual
freedom, views that were scandalous for the time.
The sources list an almost constant stream of
dramatic relationships that resulted in children
and great emotional upheaval. Constant drama.
He had a brief affair with the writer Dorothy
Richardson that led to a pregnancy and miscarriage.
He later had a daughter, Anna Jane, with the
writer and suffragette Amber Reeves in 1909,
which prompted a major social scandal. And most
famously, in 1914, he had a son, Anthony West,
with the formidable novelist and feminist Rebecca
West, who was 26 years his junior. Their relationship
was long and passionate, but fraught with his
ongoing infidelities. Even after that, his life
remained complex. He partnered with the adventurer
Odette Kuhn for years. And finally, there was
Maura Budberg. a Russian adventurer. And she
was an enduring presence, wasn't she? The source
notes that she cared for him throughout his final
illness. She did, but she consistently rejected
his repeated proposals of marriage. She was fiercely
independent, a trait Wells admired, but which
tormented him. And to document all this inner
life, his complex feelings, his political views,
Wells turned to his art. He created these little
drawings and sketches he called pixuas. What
were these like? They were often burlesque commentary,
sometimes overtly criticizing his marriage to
Jane or commenting on his political adversaries.
They give us a direct, sometimes raw window into
the mind of the man behind the public persona.
Beyond his personal relationships, his religious
evolution was also complex and contradictory,
evolving over his lifetime from radical non -belief
to something approaching a new form of faith
before returning to atheism. He certainly started
by distancing himself from the established church,
deeply influenced by the scientific rationalism
of Huxley. But during his middle years, he went
through a major spiritual shift. He defended
the concept of a finite God. A finite God? What
did he mean by that? Well, in his book, God,
the Invisible King, he explicitly differentiated
this God from the traditional creator or omnipotent
deity. Instead, he saw it as closer to a redeemer,
the spirit of goodwill and moral purpose that
resides within humanity, struggling against the
chaos of the universe. This God was limited in
power, which made the struggle for progress meaningful.
A modern, ethical, rationalist spirituality.
Exactly. Yet late in life, that internal spirituality
seems to have waned. It did. Late in life, he
considered himself essentially atheistic. This
culminated in his most direct attack on organized
religion. His 1943 book, Crux Ansata, an indictment
of the Roman Catholic Church. He launched a strong
polemical attack on Catholicism, specifically
criticizing Pope Pius XII and controversially
calling for the bombing of Rome. A very inflammatory
position at the time. His political fire, however,
was also aimed at a more immediate and destructive
enemy in the 1930s, the Nazis. Wells actively
and publicly criticized German politics and its
descent into fascism. His outspokenness led directly
to his books being banned and symbolically burned
by Nazi youth in Berlin in 1933. And what action
did he take in response? As president of PN International,
that's poets, essayists, novelists, between 1933
and 1936, he oversaw the expulsion of the German
PN Club from the international body because they
had refused to admit non -Aryan writers. It was
a landmark anti -fascist act. And his anti -fascist
stance earned him a place of high danger in the
eyes of the Nazi regime. He was listed prominently
in the SS's Black Book. which was a roster of
intellectuals and public figures targeted for
immediate arrest and execution during Operation
Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of Britain.
He was correctly viewed as a massive ideological
threat. Finally, we have to mention a legal controversy
that speaks volumes about the challenges faced
by writers, especially women in that era, the
plagiarism suit of Deeks' Wales. This was a protracted
and bitter legal battle in the 1920s. A Canadian
writer, Florence Deeks, sued Wales, claiming
he had plagiarized his massive 1920s. success,
the outline of history, from her unpublished
manuscript. And what was her claim exactly? She
claimed she'd submitted her manuscript to Macmillan,
Wells' Canadian publisher, who then provided
Wells access to her work. The defense centered
on the argument that the similarities were inevitable,
as both were drawing on the same common historical
sources. Wells swore he had never seen her manuscript.
And the court sided with Wells. That was the
official verdict, yes. No proof of copying. However,
the controversy lingers because later historical
analysis suggested the court's verdict was likely
influenced by significant bias and prejudice
against the female plaintiff. She was a relatively
unknown Canadian woman going up against the world's
most famous male writer. A complicated footnote
in his career. Very. Despite the controversies
and the final pessimism of his later years, H
.G. Wells remains a monumental figure. He was
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four
times. Even without the Nobel, his influence
is undeniable. The science fiction historian
John Clute called Wells the most important writer
the genre has yet seen. He didn't just write
within the genre. He fundamentally defined its
scope. His influence crossed generations and
continents. He was a touchstone for the heavyweights
of American science fiction, Asimov, Bradbury,
Le Guin. And he influenced British writers like
Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham. And we find
surprising admirers in literary circles, too.
Vladimir Nabokov called Wells his favorite writer
when he was a boy and described him as a great
artist, especially praising his social realism
novels. provided you ignored his constant sociological
cogitations. Ah, that brings us back to that
perennial criticism, that Wells was sometimes
too focused on the pot of message rather than
the purity of the narrative. It's the constant
tension in his work. George Orwell, initially
an admirer, became a critic, arguing Wells had
become too sane to understand the modern world.
And G .K. Chesterton offered the famous stinging
quip that Wells was a born storyteller who has
sold his birthright for a pot of message. Whether
he was chasing narrative purity or world salvation,
his stories have proved incredibly resilient
and dramatic, especially through film and television.
The most famous is undoubtedly the 1938 Orson
Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds,
which famously caused panic. H .G. Welles himself
ever the pragmatist, just acknowledged the stunt
had increased sales of one of his more obscure
titles. And Wells himself has become a character
in fiction, like in the film Time After Time,
where he pursues Jack the Ripper using his own
time machine. It speaks to the deep -seated cultural
impact of his inventions. He died on August 13th,
1946, aged 79. His body was cremated, and his
ashes were scattered into the English Channel.
And fittingly, he had a final, provocative idea
for what should be inscribed on his gravestone,
a suggestion he put forward in a later edition
of his novel, The War in the Air. The ultimate
final word. delivered with his characteristic
pessimism and prophetic arrogance. I told you
so, you damn fools. In summing up this deep dive,
H .G. Wells' true genius wasn't just predicting
technologies like the airplane or the tank. It
was his relentless, lifelong commitment to synthesizing
scientific principles, ethical Darwinism, and
socialist political reform through these thrilling,
grounded narratives. His fantastic inventions
were always deeply rooted in real -world concerns
about humanity's ultimate evolutionary and political
fate. Always. We've seen the impoverished Draper's
apprentice, the disciplined biologist studying
under Huxley, the scandalous husband, and the
utopian visionary who helped inspire the atomic
age and the universal declaration of human rights.
It is an immense contradictory and enduring legacy
that defines so much of how we think about the
future today. And that enduring legacy brings
us back to his most ambitious vision for human
knowledge. the world brain. Wells called for
a global, constantly evolving, authoritative
encyclopedia, instantly accessible to every human
being, reviewed by outstanding authorities to
ensure veracity. And we've kind of built that,
haven't we? With massive digital repositories
and the World Wide Web, information is universally
accessible. We have. But the question Wells ultimately
raises for us as we navigate our daily digital
lives is this. Have we successfully constructed
the authoritative, synthesizing world brain he
dreamed of, capable of filtering truth and guiding
global rational policy? Or have we simply built
a globally accessible world nervous system that
just transmits information and misinformation
and rumor and chaos without the necessary critical
authority and synthesizing intelligence he prescribed?
Something profound to mull over as you navigate
your own digital world. That's been our deep
dive into the magnificent and messy life of HG
Wells. Thank you for joining us.