S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: WELLS, Herbert George
Aged: 79
Born: September 21, 1866
Where: Bromley, Kent, ENGLAND
Died: August 13, 1946
Where: Hanover Terrace, Regents Park, London, ENGLAND
Cremated: August 16th at Golders Green Crematorium
Married: Isabel Mary Wells
When: 1891 (div 1894)
Married 2: Amy Catherine Robbins
When: 1895 (died 1927)
Honored: By the naming of a crater on both the Moon and the planet Mars. A 1997 inductee into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
H. G. Wells
"After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times,
they
begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true."
A true Science Fiction pioneer, known as the "Father of Science Fiction" for the following reasons: In four years Wells wrote and had published, 1)The Time Machine (1895); 2)The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); 3)The Invisible Man (1897); and, 4)The War of the Worlds (1898). Four novels in four years that created time travel, genetic experimentation, invisibility, and intersteller invasion.
A socialist to the core and an outspoken critic of just about everything else except American democracy, Wells developed an annoying habit of being right in a large percentage of his prognostications . . . which occurred at a continual rate. He opened himself up to his enemies by being rather openly promiscuous and his attempts to gain public office were twarted that way. However, Wells had a pure genius for the flow of history and easily foresaw the road ahead. A politician falling under the weight of a Wells verbal attack was the same as killed in a duel.
So much of Wells' life was wrapped in the political and physical wars of the first half of the 20th century, that even with advancing diabetes in his 70's, Wells willed himself to live thru World War II. When Wells died in 1946, he had been to the mountaintop and had authored 110 novels, about 500 plus articles, and given innumerable interviews. The obituary below is so complete that I default to it. Wells was also somewhat less than diplomatic as in . . .
"Jules Verne can't write himself out of a paper sack."
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
BIOGRAPHY BOOK: Who Was Who in America, Vol II, p566
and Science Fiction Writers, Scribners 1982.
OBITUARY: New York Times, Aug 14, 1946, p1 & p25.
