H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in Kent in 1866, the son of a shopkeeper and a lady’s maid, and his early life was a series of escapes from the future his class had arranged for him. Apprenticed to a draper as a teenager and miserable, he clawed his way out through scholarships to study biology in London under T. H. Huxley — Darwin’s fiercest advocate. That training is the key to everything he wrote: Wells looked at humanity the way a biologist looks at a specimen, with interest, without flattery, and always across an enormous span of time.

The novels arrived in a remarkable burst at the end of the century. The Time Machine in 1895, then The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds within four years — inventing, between them, time travel, the mad vivisectionist, the invisibility parable, and the alien invasion. He called them scientific romances. They are still the templates, and later writers have mostly been redecorating rooms Wells built.

He spent the following half-century as one of the most prolific public voices in Britain: comic novels, social realism, popular histories, and a stream of political argument for a rationally organized world state. He was often wrong and never quiet. But the early romances endure because their real subject was never the machinery — it was the suspicion, delivered with unsettling calm, that humanity is neither permanent nor the point of the story.

More on Wells at Wikipedia.