H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells was an English writer born in Bromley on 21 September 1866 and died on 13 August 1946. He came from a modest background and worked in a draper's shop before winning his way into science teaching and then into journalism and fiction. His early scientific romances, written in the 1890s, helped shape modern science fiction. They imagined time travel, invisibility, alien invasion and the unsettling results of scientific meddling, always with a sharp eye on human behaviour.

Wells also wrote comic and realistic novels about ordinary English lives, as well as many works of social commentary, history and political argument. He was a lifelong advocate of social reform and of a more rational, united world. His ideas were widely read and often debated in his own time. Today he is remembered above all for the inventive stories that still feel fresh, and for the way they use fantasy to question the society that produced them.