Jules Verne and H.G. Wells

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905), French novelist, poet, and playwright. brought us the 20th Century. Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), English novelist, short story writer, and author of an astonishing range of nonfiction, warned us what Verne’s delivery meant. Both men’s work, unsurprisingly, is immediately and urgently relevant to the 21st Century as well.

Verne was born in Nantes. He had familial, educational, and geographic connections to the sea. He was intended to be a lawyer (his father’s profession), he was educated to be a lawyer, and he was pressured to be a lawyer. He was stubborn, however. By his early 20s he was publishing short stories and cultivating literary friendships in Paris. Theater work and other journalistic pursuits delayed his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, until 1863. All of his work is notable for thorough and meticulous research, a deep interest in technology and human psychology, a style in French that made him influential for generations to come. English translations have failed until recently to live up to the quality of his prose, and his literary reputation has taken longer to be recognized in the Anglophone world. Ray Bradbury, characteristically, summed up Verne’s influence best. In an introduction to Journey to the Center of the Earth, he wrote: “We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."

Wells was born in Kent to humble shopkeepers. A broken leg, immobilizing young Wells for weeks, led to a lifelong, almost fanatical devotion to books and reading. Teaching and skill at art were preludes to writing, which began with short stories in his early 20s and exploded onto the literary scene in 1895 with The Time Machine. The Island of Dr. Moreau followed the next year, Wells never slowed down. He wrote far more than “scientific romances.” His best short stories, his World War One novel, his odd and disturbing “horror” stories — all are on par with what his literary contemporaries were doing, including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Algernon Blackwood, and many others.