Author H.G. Wells was obsessed with the future and travelled there in his novels
When Herbert Wells found himself with time on his hands he also had time on his mind, writing a story about a time traveller 130 years ago this month.
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THE concept of travelling through time was something that occupied the thoughts of teacher and aspiring writer Herbert Wells, 130 years ago.
While staying with friends in Stoke-on-Trent, England, he began writing a story about an eccentric inventor Dr Moses Nebogipfel who visits an isolated Welsh village to work on an invention. But the villagers become suspicious and storm his house only to see him disappear in a strange contraption with the Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook. It is later revealed that the pair travelled through time.
When The Chronic Argonauts was published in The Royal College of Science’s The Science Schools Journal in April 1888, it marked a seminal moment in the history of science fiction. Although a story written in 1881 about a magic clock that transports a person in time, Wells was the first to write about a person creating a machine to travel through time at will. But despite the story ending without a proper resolution, and is not one of his best works, The Chronic Argonauts had a huge impact. The plot line of a lone inventor creating a time machine would serve as the basis for one of Wells’ best known and most influential works, The Time Machine.
His time travel tales inspired thousands of other stories about travelling to the past and the future. The Time Machine has also been adapted to stage and film, particularly the classic 1960 film starring Rod Taylor. A stage adaptation of the book by Sydney playwright Frank Gauntlett opens on Friday at The Playhouse at NIDA.
Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, on September 21, 1866, the son of a shopkeeper and professional cricketer Joseph Wells. As a child Wells broke his leg and, to occupy himself he read books, developed a love of literature and aspirations to write. But when Joseph fell on hard times financially, Wells, aged 14, was forced to take an apprenticeship with a draper. He was sacked, so he was apprenticed to a chemist, then to another draper before becoming an usher at a grammar school. At 18, he won a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School of Science. In 1888 he graduated from London University and became a science teacher, but continued to write.
Wells published his first science fiction story, A Tale of the 20th Century, in 1887. Set in the future, the plot was about perpetual motion technology in the London underground. In 1888 he was still pondering the future when he began writing The Chronic Argonauts.
The story centres on inventor Dr Nebogipfel, whose name is an amalgam of the Greek or Russian word nebo meaning sky or cloud and the German word Gipfel meaning summit or peak. In the story the doctor says he is “a man born out of my time — a man thinking the thoughts of a wiser age, doing things and believing things that men now cannot understand.”
Nebogipfel builds the Chronic Argo (after the ship Argo from Greek mythology), a machine in which he is able to move through time. But the story ends abruptly without showing the doctor’s adventures into the future. Wells simply abandons it.
But years later he revisited the idea. He speculated on writing about how the future would look if societal trends, set in motion by the Industrial Revolution, continued. A socialist, he also saw a widening gap between the working class and other classes and wondered about the future of humanity. Initially he wanted to write it as a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, but was persuaded to write it as a serialised novel, first published in 1895.
It became The Time Machine about a nameless time traveller who builds a machine and travels into a future where workers have become Morlocks, creatures who live in a subterranean world feasting on surface-dwelling Eloi.
His grim vision of the future was really a call for civilising capitalism, but disguised as an adventure story. It had an appeal beyond socialist intellectuals and became a bestseller. Wells would write many other science fictions works, including The Invisible Man (1897) War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), but they never simple adventure stories. There was always social commentary, about imperialism, the dangers of taking science and technology too far or man’s arrogance in the face of the immensity of the universe.
Like Nebogipfel, Wells was a man born out of his time, a free thinker who believed in “free love” decades before hippies espoused the notion in the ’60s and ’70s, and who was occasionally uncannily accurate in his visions of the future. In one book Men Like Gods he even predicted forms of wireless personal communication, such as the internet.
He died in 1946, but many of his works have remained in print.
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