By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Door in the Wall’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), which was published in his 1911 collection The Door in the Wall and Other Stories. One of his most popular and widely studied short stories, ‘The Door in the Wall’ is about the conflict between our private, imaginative worlds we seek solace in, and the public world of responsibility, science, and rationalism in which we are compelled to live.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle voyages to the many worlds imagined by a forgotten science-fiction pioneer
Victorian science fiction throws out one name: H. G. Wells. So comprehensively has Wells’s name come to dominate, or even define, our understanding of nineteenth-century English science fiction, that his contemporaries and precursors have been lost in the ether or relegated to the status of minor satellites, barely perceptible moons, orbiting Wells’s vast body of work. The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, published within three years of each other between 1895 and 1898, have come to be seen as the founding texts of modern science fiction in English.
But such an understanding of the emergence of this new genre in the closing years of the nineteenth century obscures the many contemporaries of Wells whose imagination and inventiveness were similarly remarkable, their stories and novels showcasing the brilliant possibilities of this new publishing phenomenon. Of all of Wells’s forgotten contemporaries, the greatest was perhaps George Griffith, sometimes known as George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones (1857-1906).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting appeal of H. G. Wells’s first great ‘scientific romance’
In some ways, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is a ‘timeless’ text: it continues to enjoy huge popularity (as witnessed by big film adaptations in 1960 and 2002, as well as the fact that the novel itself has never been out of print and is available in a range of editions), it continues to exert a considerable influence on the literature and cinema produced since, and its very narrative structure – with much of the action of the novel taking place in a time that hasn’t happened yet, the year 802,701 – in a sense absenting it from its own context.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
H. G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote dozens of books over the course of his literary career, a career which spanned over half a century. But what are the best books by H. G. Wells? As well as writing many classic works of science fiction, Wells also wrote non-fiction as well as many popular realist novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly.Â
But in this list of his best novels we’ve confined ourselves to the pick of his science fiction, since it’s for his science fiction that Wells is best remembered. As ever with our lists, we’ll start at number 10 and work our way up to what is, in our opinion, the best H. G. Wells novel of all…