On this day in 1866 the grandaddy of modern science fiction was born. Herbert George Wells was an English writer who wrote quite a lot about quite a lot of different subjects: Fifty novels and dozens of short stories as well as social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and on and on.

If I could compress his biography (which my wife gifted me a few years ago) into a few paragraphs I would. But honestly, unless you're interested in the details of his early life when his circumstances veered between modest and precarious, how sickly and accident prone he was, and how that kept him indoors where is developed a voracious appetite for books, your best introduction to Wells is through his work.

Battles over which author "invented" which genre still rage after midnight in science fiction convention con suites and on message boards. So if you feel the need to remind us that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley invented modern SF, or that a 2nd century CE Greek satirist named Lucian of Samosata wrote the first story about a journey to the Moon, have at it! That's what comment sections are for.

But there is no substantive disagreement over the fact that Wells effectively invented the alien invasion story, the time travel story, and the mad-scientist genetic horror story, and significantly developed the dystopian and techno-warfare genres.

And so today, The Time Machine. Which, if you haven't read it, [SPOILER] differs from the movie in at least one important respect. In the book, the traveler pushes all the way to the last dying days of planet Earth.

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Mahablog: Me, Venting at the Moon.

Chicago Reader: And then came the tear gas.

Attention dinosaur nerds! Paleontologists discover earliest dome-headed dinosaur!

Round Up by driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast and Science Fiction University

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