HG Wells – father of SFF (Socialist Science Fiction)

HG Wells is often called “the father of science fiction”

But HG Wells almost certainly never heard the term “science fiction” and there is no record of him ever using it

So how did HG Wells describe his own books and stories?

In an interview early in his career with the Pall Mall Gazette, Wells gave a clue to what he believed that use should be.

“My stories…are the expression of a socialistic, unbelieving person in revolt against the limitations set about his life.”

HG Wells *was* the father of SF

Not just science fiction,

but socialist fiction

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THE TIME MACHINE

It’s hard to express the bold originality of The Time Machine when it was published in 1895. The very idea of a time machine, that we now take for granted, did not exist until Wells invented it.

The Time Machine developed from Wells 1888 story The Chronic Argonauts. Decades of imagination went into creating a new conception of deep time and human evolution.

The Time Traveller journeys 800,000 years into our future, a measure of time enough that humanity has evolved into two distinct species.

But the Eloi and Morlocks aren’t only an illustration of future human evolution. The Eloi are a pampered elite. But every now again, the Morlock working class rise up, and eat the Eloi.

HG Wells saw the socialist revolutions of the 20th century coming.

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU

Darwinian evolution had also opened Wells eyes to the possibilities of genetics. Long before genes were discovered, Well’s speculated on the potential for the genetic manipulation of life.

Human life. The Beast Folk created by Doctor Moreau may seem tame to us today, but Wells was among the first to grasp the horrifying possibilities of genetic manipulation.

And to ask whether humans can ever escape our genes. Are humans eternally subject to our nature? Or can humanity raise ourselves up from our origins as a species?

It’s the question posed by Doctor Moreau, and at the heart of socialist ideologies in the 20th century.

THE INVISIBLE MAN

The Invisible Man was likely inspired by the Tyndal effect, that light becomes visible only when refracted through the atmosphere.

By manipulating light refraction, Griffin, the only name given to the novel’s protagonist, becomes invisible. And uses that invisibility in a failed attempt to otherthrow British society.

HG Wells understood the invisibility of working class men. A long childhood sickness turned the young Wells into a well read and imaginative boy.

But aged thirteen Wells was indentured as a drapers assistant in Windsor. Wells’ active mind made this drudgery unbearable, and shaped his hatred of the British class system.

Working class men in Britain would not be fully enfranchised until 1918. Working men were, for most of Wells’ life, socially irrelevant and invisible. But it was those men, as they began to read and learn about politics, who powered the socialist revolutions of the 20th century.

WAR OF THE WORLDS

War of the Worlds made HG Wells world famous.

Again, when alien invasions are today such a cliche of science fiction, it’s hard to remember what an incredible conceptual leap Wells’ story of Martians coming to Earth truly was.

War of the Worlds is also the novel where HG Wells throws down the gauntlet to call out British imperialism.

And Britain…didn’t really notice.

War of the Worlds was a massive bestseller in late Victorian Britain, and almost nobody noticed it was a polemical depiction of British colonialism.

The Martians are the British, and the territory being colonised is…Woking, Horsell Common, and the Home Counties.

Which are called the Home Counties because all the wealth of the British invasions of other lands flowed back home to them.

The heart of Empire, itself invaded.

War of the Worlds was sold as a new take on “Invasion Literature” like The Battle of Dorking, a reactionary and racist genre that imagined Britain invaded by the very “natives” the Empire colonised.

But Wells subverts the genre. His Martians have the technological superiority, and the “cool and unsympatheic” intellect of the British themselves.

And the Martians, as so often happened to British Imperial invasion forces, are defeated by sickness. Malaria defeated multiple British invasion forces. A common cold stops the Martians.

Wells’ early novels made him world famous, and developed many of the core ideas, from time travel to alien invasions, that became “science fiction”.

But they also show us the deep injustices of Wells’ world. An imperial world of colonial armies that murdered people of other races. A capitalist world of factories and sweatshops in which men, women and children were compelled to work. A world that would very soon tear itself apart in world war.

HG Wells dreamed of making a better world, of building a new world order, with the power of socialism.