British · 1866–1946
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer who essentially invented the genre of scientific romance — what we now call science fiction — with a sequence of short, propulsive novels in the 1890s. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds appeared within three years of each other and established templates for two entire genres: time travel and alien invasion. Both are available in warpread.app. At 32,000 and 60,000 words respectively, they can each be read in a single RSVP session.
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A Victorian inventor tells his dinner guests an unbelievable story: he has built a machine that travels through time, and he has just returned from the year 802,701, where humanity has split into two species and civilization has done worse than collapse. The book that gave us the phrase.
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