– BBC World Service – London Letter – H.G. Wells Tribute – August 28, 1946 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Since October invariably means Halloween and Halloween invariably means the legendary radio broadcast of “War Of The Worlds” which managed to panic a goodly portion of America, Halloween night 1938. A reminder that War Of The Worlds was the product of writer H.G.Wells vivid and prolific imagination (although Orson Welles did do some “creative fiddling” with the original story) and that Wells was the author of many landmark novels and short stories throughout his life, which ended on August 13, 1946 and this tribute, by way of the BBC’s World Service on the weekly program London Letter from August 23 of that year.
Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells’ science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the “father of science fiction”.
In addition to his fame as a writer, he was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. As a futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the “Shakespeare of science fiction”, while Charles Fort called him a “wild talent”.
Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed “Wells’s law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 with “O Realist of the Fantastic!”. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907), and the dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1910). Novels of social realism such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910), which describe lower-middle-class English life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
In the United Kingdom, Wells’s work was a key model for the British “scientific romance”, and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon, J. D. Beresford, S. Fowler Wright, and Naomi Mitchison, all drew on Wells’s example. Wells was also an important influence on British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss expressing strong admiration for Wells’s work. A self-declared fan of Wells, John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, echoes Wells’s obsession with catastrophe and its aftermath. His early work (pre 1920) made Wells the literary hero of dystopian novelist George Orwell. Among contemporary British science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter, Christopher Priest and Adam Roberts have all acknowledged Wells’s influence on their writing; all three are vice-presidents of the H. G. Wells Society. He also had a strong influence on British scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), “The Last Judgement” and “On Being the Right Size” from the essay collection Possible Worlds (1927), and Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years (1963), which are speculations about the future of human evolution and life on other planets. Haldane gave several lectures about these topics which in turn influenced other science fiction writers.
Here is a tribute to the passing of H.G. Wells as it was broadcast by the BBC on August 23, 1946.
