WHY IS H.G. WELLS CONSIDERED AS THE FATHER OF THE SCIENCE FICTION?

WHY IS H.G. WELLS CONSIDERED AS THE FATHER OF THE SCIENCE FICTION?

Although Herbert George Wells was born in the year 1866, more than a hundred years ago, he is recognized for his works in the scope of science fiction, and even more than that, he is considered as a “Prophet” owing to the fact that, in some of his works and novels, he predicted technologies that were not even theories during the time these stories were written. H.G. Wells had an astounding talent to look beyond the time and see the future in a unique way, a way he attempted to portrait to the generation of those years in the past, a way that until now has a remarkable persistence and validity.  The fact that he belonged to a humble social position never implied a barrier for him to develop his innate aptitudes, on the contrary, this apparently handicap signified for him a new challenge against the life and the right opportunity to demonstrate to himself that he was capable to create gold out of stones. We will briefly analyze the life of this so-called “Man Who Invented Tomorrow”, besides we will also define what the science fiction genre is, all this procedures are meant for a more accurate understanding of all the edges that converged and gave as a final result the “Father of Science Fiction”.

Herbert George Wells was born on September 21^st, 1866 in Bromley, county of Kent, England and died on August 13^th, 1946. Although he wrote great works in many other genres such as novels, history, politics and social matters; he is best known for his work in the science fiction genre. Together with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsbabk, Wells is considered as the “Father of the Science Fiction”. 

His father was a domestic gardener, shopkeeper and cricket player, three jobs may seem too much for anybody; however, the truth is that merely from this latter activity he received a decent wage, wage that constituted the main income for this lower middle class family. Moreover, due to the poor economic situation that the family was undergoing, his mother saw herself in the need of a job; consequently she found the most emblematic job for women in those years: domestic servant.

In the year 1874, when Wells was 8 years old, he suffered an apparently devastating accident which confined him to be in bed for a long time because his leg was broken; apparently since to pass the time in a not unexciting way, the little Wells started to read books from the local library, books that were borrowed for him by his caring father. We can state that since this moment Wells became committed to the other worlds and dimensions, and his aspiration to write started to be more and more powerful, as a result he entered to a writing academy. Nevertheless, owing to the tragic fact that his sportive father suffered an unexpected and unwanted accident which caused the fracture of his thigh, this vigorous father was unable to continue playing cricket and hence receiving money from that occupation. As a result the income at home was truly low, and Herbert had not only to leave his writing academy, but also he and his brothers were forced by the situation to start working in different places and occupations at a very early stage of their lives. Her mother, who had happily stopped working for a few years, started to work again this time as a lady’s maid in a house that had a well provided library. Luckily, in this house Herbert had access to works like the Republic by Plato and the Utopia by More. Years later, he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, where he was one of the founders of The Science School Journal, a school magazine, where he published his novel “The Time Machine” under the title “The Chronic Argonauts”. We can also state that he was not only a writer, and as a method of self-expression, Wells sketched (made drawings) about different topics, such as politics, current literature, and romantic interests.

Besides, in the year 1891 he married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells; however, he left her in 1894 for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he married in 1895, he had 2 sons with Amy; nevertheless,  he also had many other love affairs with about 7 other women.

Our idealist young Wells had a Socialist heart, this sympathy was the motor that led him to join the Labor Party of UK in 1922. Moreover, he had the idea of a “World State” (pure socialism) in this vision of the society people is able to progress by means of merit rather than birth, he was against the Nationalism, though. He expressed many times that he supported the WWI, this is not bizarre if we consider the fact that he also supported sterilization for people with diseases, abortion, infanticide, suicide, and euthanasia for the “inferior”, for the misshapen, the mentally ill, the alcoholic, the criminal, and even for the defenseless. Wells also favored the killing of not only individuals but also of a complete race, this is something he called “Natural Selection” utilizing the Darwinian terminology.

Although all these features may seem to be radical, and in fact they are, he also suggested that a democracy by electoral representation was much more efficient than the imperialism, further, he considered Stalin as an honest and fair leader. Because of these facts mentioned above many people started to criticize him, and consequently his popularity decreased among the people who supported him in the old days, and this fact, together with his frustrated effort to prevent WWII in the League of Nations led him to a depressive period in his life: “The period of Frustration”, period in which he was not supported by any god or goddess because he did not have any religious orientation. Even though he accepted that anyone can feel free to choose the best way to feel close to any religion and also to feel the presence of God. This depressive state of mind took Wells to a weakness that was increasingly dangerous for his career, weakness that was reflected in his works and also in his health, we can see this in the fact that he suffered of diabetes. Our now weak man was being defeated by the lack of care coming from the society, but once more he stayed strong and stayed up facing the life and created a charity organization aimed to help people who suffer diabetes. The name of this organization is “Diabetes UK” and it continues its activity until the current days. Although years later Wells died (under “not specified” causes), he continues alive in the blood of the beneficiaries of his charity and also in the hearts and minds of his devoted readers that still nowadays believe that his most extravagant “prophecies” will come true one day, sooner or later.

            Wells was a genius of the Science Fiction genre, but what does this statement involve? What do we mean when we talk about Science Fiction? We may imagine a setting in the future, in an alternative moment of the history, or in the outer space where the characters coexist with advanced technologies, technologies and machineries that many times contradict the laws of physics, the laws of nature, and sometimes contradict the life itself in an amazing way that leads our minds to unexpected situations in impossible worlds. Wells was an expert in creating this parallel dimensions and a mastermind in make us believe and feel every single atom of his supernatural worlds.

            This worlds shaped by his own hands were unique and amazing, we can refer to the case of “The island of Dr. Moreau”, in which a mad doctor and scientist on a remote island created hybrid beings composed of human and animals, and the unfortunate witness (Prendick) of this eccentric reality is finally taken by this new world order and when he returns to the “civilized society” of London he finds himself a stranger in there and needs to go to live in an isolated place away from the people. Doctor Moreau is unfortunately assassinated by a Puma- woman he created, but where is the fantastic feature in this story? It was not until the year 1953, that two scientists proved that DNA was able to be used in order to trespass genetic information, this became the starting point of the genetic engineering; nonetheless, Wells had predicted this decades before.

We can also refer to the work called The War of the Worlds, in which creatures that look like octopuses coming from the planet Mars come to the Earth and attack humans by creating huge machines shaped as tripods, this machineries almost exterminate the human race with his most powerful weapon: rays that dissolve people, where have we heard something like this? Let us state that this book was written in the year 1898 and it was not until 1917 that Albert Einstein in his Quantum Theory of Radiation, showed to the world that something called laser could be possible, but only in the year 1928 the laser was created. Wells also talks about biological war in this book, biological war that nowadays constitutes one of the biggest fears of humankind.

In the year 1901, Wells, wrote the novel “The first men on the Moon”, there is no need to say that in this book he foretold a lunar landing, and these first men on the Moon (two odd scientists) found Moon inhabitants, beings called “Selenites” organized in a prolific civilization. The Apollo XI mission, 68 years after this book was written, reached the lunar surface.

“Men like Gods” is a story in which a journalist together with other Englishmen are unintentionally transported to a parallel reality: the world of Utopia, which is a sort of advanced Earth with unbelievably advanced means of communication, such as wireless telephones and voice mails, does this sound familiar to us? The first email was sent almost 50 years after this book was published.

Wells wrote more than 100 works, about a fifty percent of them were science fiction works, but in this opportunity we will only refer to just one more of his works, this is “The invisible man” the story deals about a scientist who theorizes that if a person’s refractive index is modified to the exact index of the air and his/her body does not absorb the reflect of light or “photons”, the result will be that this human being will be invisible. Luckily Mr. Griffin, our protagonist, success in this project and he carries out this modus operandi on himself, unfortunately the unexpected issue appears on the story, and our underprivileged  scientist cannot become visible again, and because of this failure he becomes mentally insane. Extraordinarily, in the last 10 years a Japanese scientist is working on a coat of invisibility, the one who wears this coat becomes not even traceable for radars, he has been successful, but this current Japanese Mr Griffin is trying to expand his discovery and make it work even with warplanes... to which extent the fiction can be real? And to which extent these new technologies will be used in a constructive way and not for damaging ourselves?

In sum, we can state that the so-called “Man Who Invented Tomorrow” had an amazing ability to look beyond the horizon of the time, and he turned his disadvantage of being a citizen of the lower-middle English class into a challenge which was far exceeded in his successful career. Wells twisted and shaped a literature genre that nowadays generates not only great commotion, but also strong feelings of abstraction in the ones who realise that more than a hundred years ago this former humble man created a new world order, a reality that a century ago was impossible to come true, the reality within which we live nowadays. In this point becomes obvious the title he received: “Father of the Science Fiction”.