became the opening chapter of the Wheels of Chance.2

The poverty of his early years—like the protagonist of The Wheels of Chance, he was apprenticed to a draper in 1880, worked a seventy-hour week, lived in a dormitory, and ate unhealthy food—coupled with his scientific training at the Normal School of Science, where he was a scholarship student, made him acutely aware of the shortcomings of sanitary conditions in England, so that when he oversaw the construction of his first house, Spade House, in 1900, he made certain it would be as modern a structure as possible, especially with regard to plumbing.

Knowing exactly where Wells lived in 1895 is essential for an understanding of The War of the Worlds because he minutely explored the area around Woking by bicycle and made it the setting for his romance, as he says in a letter in which he comments on the first, magazine version of the novel:

I’m doing the dearest little serial for Pearson’s new magazine in which I completely wreck and sack Woking—killing my neighbors in painful and eccentric ways—then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.3

Once again, as he had in The Invisible Man, Wells would create a situation in which the world right outside the door is invaded by a totally fantastic agency. This is his literary masterstroke in The War of the Worlds, making banal reality into something terrifying, a technique that contrasts vividly with his modus operandi in, for example, The Time Machine or When the Sleeper Wakes, where a character from Wells’s present is magically transported to the future. In those works, Wells’s social message is more overt, while in novels like The Invisible Man or The War of the Worlds the reader is caught up in the combination of the everyday and the bizarre. Small wonder Orson Welles ( 1915-1985) caused panic and mass hysteria in October 1938, when he transposed The War of the Worlds to New Jersey for a Halloween radio program.

What Wells constantly suggests is that reality in 1895 England is a paradox. For example, the nation where the industrial revolution was born lacked a uniform electrical grid. This meant that only parts of London had electricity and that outside of London people had to use gas and oil lamps for lighting. The reasons why electrification in England lagged so far behind Germany and the United States are complex but probably relate to public distrust of utility monopolies. During the nineteenth century, concessions to railroad companies, then gas companies, then water companies meant that owners of land saw huge chunks of their property ceded to private companies. Finally, they resisted, and the result, beginning in 1882 with the Electrical Lighting Act, was a series of retrograde measures that hamstrung national electrification.

This situation, in which local interests—private property and personal animosities—thwart something that is an obvious advantage to the entire community, is the kind of dilemma Wells understood to be absurd. If electrical power is good for all, then, Wells would argue, it should be brought in as soon as possible. The welfare of all must take precedence over the welfare of the few, though soon enough Wells began to see that some members of society were more important than others, that a technocratic elite not only had the right but the obligation to run society.

His most important statements about the future appear in Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902). This is Wells writing what we might call “futurology,” probable changes in human life and society that flow logically, at least from the author’s point of view, from the current situation. Wells’s hopes for the future—these articles are, after all, speculations and not prophecies—reside on a single principle: that future society, which Wells calls the “New Republic,” will be governed by a confederation of technocrats scientifically trained to deal with a world where economic globalization is a fact of life.

These New Republicans will not be benevolent but pragmatic. For example, they will regard war not as a conflict between armies but one between peoples. This is the “total war” Adolph Hitler ( 1889-1945) put into practice, an idea that includes not only military campaigns but the actual right to exist of “inferior people,” whole races Wells views as excluded from the technological domination of nature. As he himself says:

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the