and, over millennia, evolved into equus—declares that evolution is the success of those animals that best meet the challenges of their environment through transmission to successive generations of genetic variations favoring survival—a concept he termed “natural selection.” This theory becomes a lens through which scientists tried to understand the history of the natural world.

It also produced the false corollary “survival of the fittest,” used by those, following Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who sought to apply Darwin’s ideas to human society—so-called “social darwinists”—to show that there are superior and inferior human types. This perversion of Darwinian thought influenced the views of H. G. Wells on society and shows that he was as much a product of his age as he was a shaper of it. That is, Wells, fascinated by technology and science (his intellectual training was almost totally scientific), gathered into himself the progressive, evolutionary theories that dominated the nineteenth century but transfused them with yet another nineteenth-century idea: entropy.

Loosely stated, entropy describes a tendency in dynamic systems to lose energy and degrade. We might think of a car battery as an example: When new, the battery is able to start the automobile and keep its lights burning. Over time, the chemical reaction that produces the electricity in the battery weakens until finally the battery is dead. Speculative thinkers—notably, in the case of Wells, his teacher, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)—applied this idea to nature and humanity. Where Darwin’s ideas of human evolution seemed to open a path leading humanity to an almost angelic state, this theory suggests we are susceptible to decay and decline, an idea Wells puts into practice in his first novel, The Time Machine, in which the Time Traveller discovers humanity some eight hundred thousand years in the future to have degenerated into little more than animals.

So in the last third of the nineteenth century, when Wells was beginning his career, thinking people had begun to question the biological, social, and industrial optimism of the century’s first seventy-five years. At the same time, those final decades could not shake themselves free of a dynamic concept of human and natural history—that is, that change may be for the better or it may be for the worse, but the entire universe is subject to change of some kind, in contradistinction to the Judaic or Christian idea of a stable universe created by God (which He will one day destroy).

Humans, Wells thinks, have it within them to take charge of their history but refuse to do so because of ignorance, fear, or self-interest. Why have a monarchy in Great Britain, when no king or queen could hope to govern a modern nation? There is no rational answer to this question since the idea that someone is “naturally” born to lead a people flies in the face of common sense.

Wells would find himself at odds with traditional society over the course of his entire life. He would be a tireless promoter of educational reform: Why study Latin or Greek, he would argue, when British society, especially at the start of the twentieth century, was so desperately in need of people with scientific training? He would eventually envisage a non-Marxist socialism as the best kind of society. He conceived the ideal social system as a single, globalized nation in which all peoples participate, in which all individuals work within industries governed by boards of directors that regulate production and protect the well-being of workers.

Wells wanted to abolish the notion of class conflict by eliminating class distinctions, an idea that certainly put him at odds with British conservatives and with Marxists as well. What current society needed, Wells felt, was a jolt that would startle people into realizing just how haphazard and disorganized their societies were and stimulate them to create a rational and universal society. Such is the thinking behind his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, in which the invading Martians destroy society and thereby open the way for a new world organization. In real history, Wells hoped that the wholesale destruction of World War I would produce a system of world government so that nation-states would no longer have any reason to be at one another’s throats. It was, he thought, our primitive taste for violence that prevented a better world. In this, as World War II would confirm, he was only too right.

But the H. G. Wells of 1895 was still a young man of twenty-nine struggling to find a way out of poverty and insecurity. He’d recently married