Author

H. G. Wells

Wells used impossible machines to write about class, empire, and the future as a place we might not like. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are the pair on this shelf.

The Time Machine

by H. G. Wells

1895 · Science fiction · Novel

A Victorian inventor rides his machine to a future in which humanity has split. Wells’s novella is a social argument dressed as a traveler’s report.

The War of the Worlds

by H. G. Wells

1898 · Science fiction · Novel

Martian cylinders fall on the English countryside and the narrator walks through the collapse of ordinary life. Wells aimed the invasion at the empire that had invaded others.