a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts.... But these stories of mine ... do not pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schlemil, and the story of Frankenstein.... They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream (see, in “For Further Reading,” The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G. Wells, p.i).

Wells links himself to a tradition, but at the same time he misleads the reader. It is true, as he says in the same preface, that “The invention is nothing in itself,” by which he means that the applied science of Verne is of no interest in his kind of tale. It is also the reason why rediscoveries of Verne, especially films, are always set in the past: His projections became fact very quickly. By the same token, this explains why Wells’s inventions and their ramifications will always be modern.

This choice of fantasy over plausible scientific projection is also what separates Wells’s kind of fantasy from writing that depends on magic or the supernatural to shock the reader: There are no werewolves or vampires in these novels, and Wells does not break the laws of nature, except in the instance of the basic proposition animating each fiction—time travel or invisibility. This swerves Wells away from authors of the “Gothic” tradition, like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, or Charles Maturin, whose primary intention is to arouse the reader’s fear. That same intention appears in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), published in the same year as The Invisible Man, though, ironically, vampires have come over the years to have their own symbolic values, from being metaphors about sexuality to being symbols of the way capitalists drink the lifeblood of the proletariat.

If we wonder about Wells’s immediate antecedents, we would probably have to begin, following his lead, with Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), despite the myriad films based on it, really presents the problems of creation—artistic or scientific—disconnected from traditional notions of morality or religion: creation for the sake of creation or creation for the sake of ego, an idea quite relevant both to the Time Traveller, whose mysterious machine resembles nothing more than a Victorian motorcycle (if such a thing is imaginable) with no visible mechanism, and to the Invisible Man, who labors to make himself invisible only to satisfy his own selfish needs.

The affinities between Mary Shelley’s protagonist, Frankenstein, whose means for infusing life in a pieced-together body Shelley leaves as vague as the time machine in terms of technique, and Griffin, Wells’s invisible protagonist, are clear: Each isolates himself from society to pursue a scientific goal that can only be understood as a triumph of will. Frankenstein has no real altruistic purpose in creating his monster; he only wants to copy God—like the titan Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s subtitle, who fashions man out of clay—by creating a creature who will adore him as its creator. Griffin at first simply wants to see if he can do in fact what he thinks he can do in theory. Only after he becomes invisible does he become a terrorist who threatens the established order of society.

It is that part of Griffin’s story that most concerns Wells, himself unhappy with the status quo and desirous of bringing about changes in society. What Wells hoped would one day come into existence was a socialist state organized along the lines of a factory, but a factory in which labor and management were a single body. He radically opposed the Marxist idea that current society was based on the opposition between an owning class of capitalists and a working class of proletarians. In fact, The Time Machine is a voyage to a future in which the Marxist concept has become fact and society has evolved into two classes of beings: subterraneans who feed and clothe surface dwellers who spend their lives singing, playing, and making love. The horror of this relationship is