H. G. Wells:

The father of science fiction

Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, England. He is was a timeless science fiction writer, who influenced other great writers such as Isaac Asimov, Stan Lee, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis and Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

He was also a teacher, historian and a journalist. He is best known for his famous and timeless novels The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

He was a productive writer of both fiction and non fiction, who wrote along the lines of many genres such as contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. Both Wells and Jules Verne are sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction".

H. G. Wells' family wasn't very well off; in fact all of their income came from a china shop they owned, from his father's small businesses and his cricket games. Believe it or not Wells' life took a turn for the better when he met with an accident, at the age of seven, and was bed ridden for quite a while with a broken leg.

This was when, he started reading, which later encouraged him to write. In 1877 yet another accident left his father with a fractured thigh and unable to play cricket any more and therefore was unable to financially help the family and decided to put his sons in various apprenticeships.

Wells was not happy during this period of time but these experiences became material for the novels he wrote later on such as The Wheels of Chance and Kipps. In these he criticised the world distribution of wealth. He failed at being a draper's apprentice, a chemist's assistant and a teaching assistant. And after each failure he came to Uppark, where his mother worked as a house maid.

Wells' first best seller was Anticipations, 1901 and is considered his most explicitly prophetic work. The whole book is an anticipation of what the world would be in the year 2000. Wells also wrote several dozen short stories and novels, the best known of which is The Country of the Blind, 1904.

His short story The New Accelerator was the inspiration for the Star Trek episode, Wink of an Eye. Leo Szilard acknowledged that the book, The World Set Free, 1914, inspired him to theorise the 'nuclear chain reaction'.

In more ways than one, Wells was a socialist, he always sought a better way of organising the society, in his Utopian novels. In the Days of the Comet, he paints a story of how the world is heading in the direction of destruction and how, the mysterious gases of a comet put things to right, by changing how humans behave.

And in The Shape of Things to Come, 1933 - which was later made in to the movie, Things to Come - he depicts how the destructive ways of the human kind is stopped short by a world council of scientists taking over, in which the consequences of World War was accurately depicted.

His most famous The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon have all been made in to movies. H. G. Wells even has a crater, on the far side of the moon, named after him 'H. G. Wells crater'. Wells died of liver cancer on 13 August, 1946, at the age of 79, in his home in London. Wells is considered to be one of the pioneers of science fiction.