One object to be found in the David M. Rubenstein Library Rare Book & Manuscripts Library is the “Bibliography of the Works of H.G. Wells 1893-1925 (with some notes and comments)” written by Geoffrey West. Despite this book being a rather dry set of citations (with some notes and comments), detailing the date of publication, journal and similarities of Wells’s works, this text can give its readers a lot of information about H.G. Wells’s growth and evolution as an author and a person.
From the first skim-through, several things could be said about Wells’s authorship. First, his most popular works: “ War of the Worlds” , “ The Time Machine”, “ The Invisible Man”, etc. were all written in the late 19th century – at the start of his writing career .
Another fairly interesting observation is the impact that World War One had on his works. The titles of all his pieces radically changed in style. No longer does he write science fiction – instead he writes something more akin to political treatises, and stories concerning peace and the impact of war. Some of these, perhaps, are still in the genre of science fiction but these mainly appear to be short essays leaning towards the non-fictional side of writing. These works are less popular, but still important to understanding H.G. Wells as an author.
This brings me to why Wells’s early works were so impactful . While his popular texts all contain some sort of sci-fi element – be it a machine or scientific advancement, they focus much more on the subject of human emotion and psychology rather than that fantastical element. Of course, in “The Time Traveler” there is a magnificent description of what time travel looks like, or in “ The Invisible Man” we learn about the set of experiments that brought about the subject of the story, however these are not the foci of the narrative. The sci-fi element is merely a setting and a tool that allows for Wells’s ideas to be placed more poignantly, for him to freely dive into topics that, presumably, bother or fascinate him. For example, both “ A Dream of Armageddon” and “The Time Machine” pose the question of “ What does one do when the love of their life dies?”. In ” A Dream of Armageddon”, we see a man who lives a second life inside his dream – not too different from Zhuangzhi’s butterfly. He falls in love and tries to escape war only for it to kill the love of his life before his very eyes. This leads to him dying within that dream, forced to live out the rest of his life in our reality with an emptiness in his chest, perceived mad by those around him. The Time Traveler, however deals with his emptiness in a different fashion instead of dying, the he continues to travel on – ironically unable to escape his past despite having dominion over time.
World War 1 started. How horrifying it must have been for Wells to slowly see the things he wrote about, perhaps things he made up on the fly, slowly start to appear – scenes from his “Dream of Armageddon” inacting themselves on a regular if not daily basis. This changed something in him, and he turned to writing about peace and politics in hopes that these new dreams and sometimes fictions would realize themselves just as well as the horrors did. While he did not serve in the war himself, he was greatly impacted by it and his once whimsical and fantastical writing bears scars of this impact.
Compiled snippets of the bibliography
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