Wells predictions that have come true, as well as some that haven't-at least not yet. Impressed is the word, O Realist of the Fantastic!” he wrote Wells after reading The Invisible Man.

“I am always powerfully impressed by your work. No less a writer than Joseph Conrad agreed. Wells’s ideas have also endured because he was a standout storyteller, James adds. That's why he's so predictive in his writing,” explains Simon James, head of the English Studies department at Durham University and the editor of the official journal of the H.G. “Wells's was an imagination in a hurry, he wanted to get to the future sooner than it was going to happen.

Goddard's liquid-fuelled rocket to the cell phone.

In 2012, published a top ten list of inventions inspired by sci-fi, ranging from Robert H. Writers in this tradition have a history not just of imagining the future as is might be, but of inspiring others to make it a reality. Wells, born in 1866, was trained as a scientist, a rarity among his literary contemporaries, and was perhaps the most important figure in the genre that would become science fiction. Wells conjured some futuristic visions that haven't (yet) come true: a machine that travels back in time, a man who turns invisible, and a Martian invasion that destroys southern England.īut for a man born 150 years ago, many of Wells's other predictions about the modern world have proven amazingly prescient.

A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells