Wells’s first major science-fiction novel introduced a machine-built method of time travel and used it to explore long-term social change. The future world of the Eloi and Morlocks turns class division into a vivid warning story, helping set a pattern for later “scientific romance” writing.
This novel follows a shipwreck survivor who discovers Dr. Moreau’s experiments creating human-animal hybrids through vivisection (surgery on living animals). Wells uses the island setting to question how far science should go, and what “human” means when bodies and behavior are forcibly changed.
Wells turned a laboratory breakthrough into a suspenseful story about a scientist, Griffin, who becomes invisible and then increasingly violent. The book helped define a modern “science-gone-wrong” plot, showing how power without accountability can quickly become a threat to ordinary life.
In this short story, astronomers track a new object entering the solar system, and Earth experiences catastrophic effects as it passes dangerously close. Wells uses a scientific viewpoint to portray disaster on a global scale, an approach that influenced later end-of-the-world science fiction.
Wells’s Martian invasion novel turned imperial fears back onto Britain, imagining what it feels like to be overpowered by a technologically superior force. Its mix of journalism-like realism and shocking destruction became a model for later alien-invasion and catastrophe stories.
This collection gathered several earlier magazine pieces (including “The Star”) into a single volume. It helped spread Wells’s shorter “scientific romance” work to a wider book audience and showed how he could explore big ideas in compact narratives.
Wells imagined a voyage to the Moon using “cavorite,” a fictional material that blocks gravity. The explorers discover the Selenites, an organized lunar society, letting Wells compare human ambition and conflict with a very different kind of civilization.
In this novel, scientists create a substance that causes massive growth, producing giant animals and children. Wells uses the idea to examine how one discovery can upset social order and politics, and how society reacts when “normal scale” is no longer a safe assumption.
Wells used a comet encounter as a science-fiction device to trigger a worldwide shift in human behavior and ethics. Instead of focusing on destruction, the story explores how a sudden change in thinking could transform politics, relationships, and daily life.
This novel imagines a future war shaped by aircraft, with global conflict spreading rapidly beyond old battle lines. By centering an ordinary character caught in large events, Wells emphasizes how new technology can make wars broader, faster, and harder for civilians to escape.
Wells described “atomic” weapons that keep releasing energy and reshape warfare and world politics. The novel connects scientific progress with moral risk, arguing that new power sources can force society to choose between collapse and new forms of global cooperation.
In this later “scientific fantasy,” a group of people from early-1920s England are thrown into an alternate world organized around reason and long-term planning. After decades of darker disaster and war scenarios, Wells used this book to revisit utopia as a serious question: what would a better society require, and what would visitors bring with them that might threaten it?
H. G. Wells — Major Science Fiction Works (1895–1929)