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 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."
Isaac Asimov authored over 400 books in a career that lasted nearly
50 years. As a leading scientific writer, historian, and futurist,
he covered a variety of subjects ranging from mathematics to humor,
and won numerous awards for his work.
“The creations of Mr. Wells . . . belong unreservedly to an age and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible.” —Jules Verne
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