Shop boy. Biology student. Then he frightened the century on purpose. Four shocks in four years: a machine that leaves the present, an island that should not exist, a man you cannot see, a war from the sky. After the scientific romances he wrote England as it actually was — drapers, patent medicine, class as a disease — then tried to explain the whole of history in plain prose and tell the planet to grow up. Fabian. Futurist. A journalist who would not stay in one genre. The time machine is one invention. He spent the rest of his life arguing with the world it implied.
The War of the WorldsH. G. Wells
