Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer who, as H. G. Wells, achieved worldwide acclaim during his lifetime for his journalism as well as for his fiction, both realistic and speculative, yet today is known solely for his science fiction. Throughout his career, Wells was driven by a need to spread the gospel of science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. He wanted to explore social issues through Utopianism, while, ever practical, keeping a firm grasp on his Socialist Party membership card. However, he also had a knack for spinning a ripping good yarn.
Wells’s most notable science fiction includes The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Just as Edgar Allan Poe’s stories more or less created the horror and mystery genres (and included early science fiction), Wells could be said, along with the French writer Jules Verne, to be the forefather of modern science fiction. Verne, whose best work was published before the twentieth century, held the public imagination through fanciful modern-era “megafauna” like the giant submarine the Nautilus and mechanical people-mover elephants, for which Verne even provided detailed blueprints. But Wells found such stunts from his rival annoying and was less interested in whether a mecha-elephant could actually clomp and clank across the earth than in charting the effect of mass societal changes in technology and biology. In a sense, even though their stories were both grouped under the label of “science romance,” Verne embraced a Romantic vision of science fiction and Wells was a somewhat cynical futurist.
He often cast a jaundiced eye at modern humanity. The shadow of Poe permeates Wells’s work in that Wells heeded the horror in Poe’s fiction, especially in works like The Island of Dr. Moreau. While Wells could find his way to a happy ending or return to the status quo, the path there would always be bleaker and more influenced by an outlook on humankind that reflected the realities of history. This cold-eyed analysis lent his vision of the future its staying power, a seeming realism that had a significant influence on science fiction in the United States and the United Kingdom during the rise of pulp magazines and the community devoted to them.
Wells became more cynical about technology after the horrors of World War I, and not only did he lose faith in humanity, he stopped writing science fiction. In doing so, he also lost from his later novels some spark or energy that would recommend them to a modern reader. The creativity required to come up with an extrapolation of the improbable had energized Wells’s imagination in a way that made his science fiction more interesting than his other fiction.
“The Star” (1897), as with much of Wells’s science fiction, is credited with creating a subgenre—in this case, the “impact” subgenre, as of some object falling from the sky onto Earth or other planets, or heavenly bodies colliding. Such stories tend to revolve around a mystery about the object in question, or focus on the reactions of characters in the aftermath. Arthur C. Clarke mentions “The Star” in his novel Rendezvous with Rama and wrote a story with the same title (also included in this volume), although Clarke’s story has no connection to this one.