H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells is the author of The Time Machine, which Kyle reads as a foundational text of Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction — framing time as a navigable fourth dimension and following the Time Traveller into a far future split between the comfortable Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks. Through a Charles Darwin–inflected lens, Wells presents the Eloi/Morlock divergence as evolutionary degeneration: “intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble,” so the “too-perfect security” of a frictionless civilization breeds stagnation and decline. Kyle situates Wells’s vision alongside Brave New World and 1984 as a stratified, comfort-and-decay dystopia, and reads the Eloi-Haves / Morlock-Have-nots split as the projected endpoint of the industrial Capitalism of Wells’s day, ending in Entropy and the heat-death of human activity.

Context: Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer often called a “father of science fiction,” author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as histories and works of social and political commentary.

Where this appears

• The Time Machine — author of the novel; his evolutionary, anti-utopian framing of security-as-decay anchors Kyle’s reading