Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Thanks to Wells's expert storytelling and provocative insight, The Time Machine will continue to enthrall readers for generations to come.
Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on
September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and
sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady's maid. Although
"Bertie" left school at fourteen to become a draper's apprentice (a
life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School
of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry
Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in
1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel The Time Machine
rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher's salary. His
other "scientific romances"-The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The
Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men
in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908)-won him
distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in
Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined
the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I,
became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on
educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920)
and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a
world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he
bitterly observed- "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set
itself to supercede me."
Greg Bear's novels and stories have appeared in more than twenty
languages worldwide and have won numerous prizes, including two
Hugos, five Nebulas, and the Prix Apollo. His novels include
Darwin's Radio (winner of the Nebula and Endeavor awards), Darwin's
Children, Vitals, Blood Music, Eon, Queen of Angels, and Moving
Mars. He has served as a consultant and a lecturer on space and
defense policy, biotechnology and bioterrorism, multimedia
entertainment, and Internet issues.
Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature at the
Department of English Studies, Durham University. He is the editor
of The Wellsian, the peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the H.G.
Wells Society. He has edited four H.G. Wells novels for the Penguin
Classics, as well as George Gissing's Charles Dickens- A Critical
Study. James is the author of Maps of Utopia- H.G. Wells, Modernity
and the End of Culture and Unsettled Accounts- Money and Narrative
Form in the Novels of George Gissing.
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