H . G. Wells is one of those second-tier writers whose admirers always seem anxious that their man isn’t getting his due. In the case of Wells, their anxieties are, to my mind, terrifically unwarranted. The best of his books are still in print and frequently taught in graduate courses. The three most famous of them—The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man—are known all over the world, even by people with only the foggiest clue who their author was. In 2005, a film adaptation of War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg and earning $590 million, closely tracked Wells’s narrative and credited the author prominently. As I write these words, David Lodge, one of the most eminent writers in the English-speaking world, has just published a fictional account of Wells’s amorous adventures: surely an indication that H. G. Wells is an Important Subject.

Even Wells’s most zealous admirers admit, however, that he was a careless writer. That’s not to say he was lazy; at the height of his creative powers, in the mid-1890s, he was writing 7,000 words a day and contributing more than a hundred articles and reviews every year. But with only a few early exceptions he lacked the will to labor over his works once he’d written them. In that regard he’s generally thought to be inferior to Henry James, with whom he had a legendary dispute over the nature of fiction. Wells scored a few points on James in that controversy, but James clearly hit his mark when he described Wells as believing that it’s “good enough for us, such as we are, that he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture.”

Still, there’s something refreshing about a fluent and intelligent writer producing a decent book without pouring all his energies into the task. Michael Sherborne, in his well-written and scrupulously documented biography, makes a spirited case for Wells the writer. He admits the shortcomings of many of Wells’s later books but insists that even they have certain virtues that the more polished novels of other writers lack. The “top-of-the-range novels,” he writes (he’s thinking of James but also of the novelists associated with Modernism),

aspired to the cohesion of scripture, with every detail brimming with meaning. Their ideal consumer was not a reader but a devout student, willing to work at unorthodox sentences and narrative structures and to notice a detail on page 4 and link it to another on page 404. For Wells, in contrast, the novel had the linear, improvised quality of speech or, to risk a slight anachronism, a jazz or blues performance, to be enjoyed by all comers for its exuberance, momentum, and ability to achieve a satisfying coherence within a reasonably familiar form, despite digressions and stretches when inspiration plateaued.

I’m inclined to agree with Sherborne on this point. I would rather read Tono-Bungay or Love and Mr. Lewisham than Jacob’s Room or Finnegans Wake. But after reading his life of Wells, I’m left to conclude that his inadvertence as a writer was merely an outgrowth of his moral and intellectual character. He expected and demanded to be taken seriously, but he was, in fact, a deeply unserious person.

H ubert George Wells, born in 1866 and called Bertie, was the son of an Evangelical mother, Sarah, from whom he seems to have inherited a capacity for outrage and not much else, and an intermittently successful shopkeeper, Joseph, who had been a professional cricketer until he broke his thigh while (as rumor had it) helping a mistress escape over the backyard wall as Mrs. Wells was returning from church. Bertie’s tendency to make sweeping, uninformed pronouncements manifested itself early. As a twelve-year-old he wrote a short satirical story, “The Desert Daisy.” “Beats Paradise Lost into eternal smash!” raves an imaginary reviewer. By age eighteen, having read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, he was expounding the gospel of wealth distribution to whoever would listen.

After leaving home Wells experienced a series of false starts before matriculating at the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science) in London, where he studied under the militant Darwinian T. H. Huxley. Before graduating, though, Wells failed to pass Geology and lost his scholarship. In his autobiography, written a half-century later, he blamed poor teaching—the time-honored excuse of students who simply failed to make the effort.

Soon Wells discovered his facility in essay-writing and published an abstruse piece on the unpredictability of life in the revered Fortnightly Review. In 1893, he happened to read J. M. Barrie’s When a Man’s Single; one of the characters has a talent for writing interesting articles about everyday things: a Chinese umbrella, a flowerpot, a piece of straw. Wells turned the idea to good use with a piece titled “On the Art of Staying at the Seaside,” which he placed with the Pall Mall Gazette. Over the next twelve months, he published scores of such pieces in the Gazette.

He began to be noticed. There was (and indeed still is) something refreshing about Wells’s style: urbane and mellifluous but uncomplicated, totally unlike the florid prose still common in the 1890s. The year things came together was 1895. He began to write “scientific romances,” science fiction as we would say, stories that relayed fantastic events as though, owing to modern science, they were altogether plausible and real. “I found,” he would later recall,

that, taking almost anything as a starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

First came stories, “Argonauts of the Air” and “The Strange Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” among others. Then Wells had the idea of taking an old piece he’d written for the Science School magazine and reworking it into a short novel.

The Time Machine was as close to a perfect book as Wells ever wrote. The Time Traveller climbs aboard his bicycle-like invention and rides to the year 802,701. He discovers the human species has grown into two species, the graceful and playful Eloi and the aggressive, troglodytic Morlocks. Class differences had long since become so acute and irreversible that the working class retreated below ground while the leisured class remained above to frolic and be preyed upon. The Traveller escapes, barely, travels ahead 30 million years to see the dreary blobs into which the human species will evolve, then makes it back to England to tell the story.

Sherborne—like other Wellsian critics who want to contrast Wells’s early fiction with his later more ideological and clearly inferior works—repeatedly describes the book as pessimistic. His summary of The Time Machine: “It is possible to vault over one’s own death by looking into the distant future and transferring some of one’s personal concern to the human species . . . but eventually the human race will die out and the earth will come to an end.” This strikes me exactly wrong; in The Time Machine Wells was the dedicated socialist he had always been and would always remain. It’s true that the book’s a subtler piece of writing than some of his later attempts at social commentary through fiction, but its point isn’t simply that we’re doomed. It’s that we can extrapolate from present trends what the future holds and, by obvious implication, do something about it. “To me,” says the narrator on the book’s final page, “the future is still black and blank.” In that sense, at least, the work is animated by the arrogance to which socialist intellectuals have always been prone: the belief in their own capacity to see the future.

New books came fast. The Invisible Man appeared in 1887, War of the Worlds, with which Wells invented the space-invasion story, in 1898. Soon he had the reputation of a prophet. “Back in the nineteen-hundreds,” Orwell would write many years later, “it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. . . . Here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined.”

I n 1901 he published a book cumbersomely titled Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. It was here that Wells prophesied urban sprawl, a federal Europe, and the decline of traditional marriage. And it was here, too, that his lack of any moral or intellectual grounding—lack of any antecedent principle or allegiance—began to undo him. “The men of the New Republic,” he wrote, describing the ideal state toward which man is inevitably progressing, will “regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased, or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime.”

The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die . . . [ellipsis in the original] And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.

Sherborne only quotes these and similarly repugnant passages in phrases and tries hard to minimize their significance in Wells’s thinking. “This is not a rational extrapolation from existing knowledge,” he says. “It is not even the speculation of a fearless thinker. It is the fantasy of a sickly, squeaky-voiced schoolboy . . . though, to be fair to Wells, these seem to have been attitudes widely held among the educated classes.”

Sherborne’s attempt to praise Wells with faint damns is unconvincing. Even if it were true that these beliefs were “widely held among the educated classes” (and in the very next sentence he notes that Conan Doyle and Chesterton denounced Wells’s statements), why was a self-styled freethinker presenting them as bold cutting-edge prophecy?

“As ever,” writes Sherborne, “he was a quick learner. Within two years Wells would be arguing against negative eugenics; within three defending black people against race prejudice; within four advocating the desirability of a multiracial society.” The evidence for these honorable efforts is pretty thin—he praises Wells for rejecting the suggestion that criminals shouldn’t be allowed to breed on the grounds that many of them are industrious—but the outcry occasioned by Anticipations did induce Wells to back away from the ranker forms of eugenics and social Darwinism. But what can Sherborne mean by calling Wells a “quick learner”? What did he “learn”? That it’s all fine and well to be a bold, independent thinker so long as one doesn’t scandalize one’s fellow intellectuals?

Wells in fact never completely rid himself of the totalitarian outlook. At twenty, still a student, he delivered a lecture advocating “the merging of the individual in the State”: the very definition of fascism. He never stopped believing in the desirability and, indeed, feasibility of a world state run by a technical elite. As Jonah Goldberg and others have pointed out, Wells was calling for the creation of “a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis” as late as 1932 (in a speech, incidentally, that Sherborne doesn’t mention). It may be true enough that Wells was not himself a proponent of Nazism or Italian Fascism, but finding the point at which he separated himself from totalitarian doctrine is not an effortless task.

And that’s really the problem with Wells. It’s not simply that he was wrong about the most important questions of the twentieth century. The trouble with Wells is that he lacked the courage to commit himself unreservedly to his own views. His political writings collapse under the weight of all the “yes, but”s. He could criticize the Bolsheviks: “Much that the Red terror did was cruel and frightful. It was largely controlled by narrow-minded men, and many of its officials were inspired by social hatred and fear of counter-revolution.” But: “Apart from individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to an end.”

I t wasn’t just ideas to which Wells exhibited an habitual lack of commitment, either. His adulteries are legendary; indeed from around the year 1900 his biography reads like a catalogue of books (he wrote around seventy-five) and extramarital affairs (not quite seventy-five, probably, but who knows). He married his first wife, Isabel, in 1891, but by 1894 he’d been unfaithful numerous times and left her for Catherine, whom for some reason he renamed Jane, the most loyal of wives.

The Wells’s friends were a tolerant lot, most of them Fabians, a society of socialists who took a gradualist approach to economic reform. He fell out with many of them over matters of socialist doctrine; Wells advocated more decisive action to bring about a socialist state—though, ever the theoretician, he himself wasn’t willing to do anything about it. Nor was his relationship with the Fabians helped by his penchant for stealing their daughters: among them Rosamund Bland, the daughter of Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit (the father caught Wells and Rosamund at Paddington Station preparing to leave for the continent, and gave Wells a severe punch to the gut) and Amber Reeves, daughter of William Pember and Maud Reeves.

Including the two sons he had by Jane, Wells had a daughter by Amber and a son by Rebecca West, with whom he had an eleven-year affair. Other affairs were carried on with Elizabeth von Arnim, Odette Keun, and Martha Gellhorn, all authors in their own right, as well as Moura Budberg, either a Russian spy or a double agent. Wells, perhaps thinking his preference for strong women signified a modern and humane attitude, felt he was a great champion of women’s liberation. Yet with the exception of Budberg, whom he never learned to control, his treatment of actual women was appalling. He demanded leniency from his wife and mistresses, but when they exhibited anything less than wholehearted devotion he would throw tantrums—denouncing Amber for her “inconsistent behaviour,” complaining when his wife objected to Wells displaying a photograph of his young mistress in their house, and so on.

Like many another intellectual, Wells began adulthood brandishing a kind of épater le bourgeois atheism, an attitude stemming, as he would recall late in life, from a childhood dream about hell in which God appeared roasting sinners over a fire. As a physics student in the 1880s he refused to construct an experiment because it involved putting two pieces in the shape of a cross, and he enjoyed outraging his peers by referring to Jesus as “a certain itinerant preacher.” In middle age Wells began to rethink his blithe non-theology, but an empty collection of abstractions is as far as he got. The God he describes in God the Invisible King (1917) is the “immortal part and leader of mankind,” “thought and steadfast will,” and so on. The book was rightly ridiculed as meaningless; the Scottish journalist William Archer, indignant at Wells’s abandonment of atheism, aptly compared him to a ventriloquist genuflecting before his dummy.

Wells did his reputation no favors by failing to put more effort into his middle and late novels (some, it seems, are so bad that not even Sherborne hides his impatience), but it’s impossible not to admire the man’s market-savvy industriousness. No man as prolific as Wells can maintain a reputation as a prognosticator for very long, and once he got into the business of social and political commentary—he repeatedly offered rosy predictions about Allied progress in the war—his prophetic days were over. And so, in the 1920s, he turned his attention to the past.

T he Outline of History (1920) and Short History of the World (1922) were and still are highly regarded works of popular history. Leaving aside the Canadian writer Frances Deeks’s claim that the Outline contained passages lifted from a manuscript she had submitted to Macmillan (Sherborne ably defends Wells from that charge), one marvels at the steadfastness of Wells’s utopianism. The Great War and 10 million dead soldiers did nothing to damage it. On the contrary: world war had only interrupted man’s progress toward peaceful world government because, as he argues at the end of the Outline, Europeans had not been sufficiently educated to overcome the evils of nationalism. What the world needs now, he writes, is “a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history” (italics in the original). The fact that he himself had energetically supported British war efforts, for a time pitching in as a propagandist for the government, didn’t strike Wells as evidence that a reworking of the education system might not solve the problem of human conflict in the way he had always assumed it would.

Nor was he any wiser about world events after authoring this “common interpretation” of history. In a marvelous essay for Horizon in 1941, Orwell contended that Wells’s utopianism blinded him to the reality of the German threat; even after the Blitz, Wells remained one of those aloof, sardonic intellectuals who thought, as Orwell put it, “Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard.” Wells’s faith in scientific progress toward a world state made sense in the 1880s and 1890s when society was still “ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory businessmen, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.” Now, however, the only goal worth thinking about was destroying Hitler’s army, and all Wells could do was blether on about world federalism.

But Wells’s utopianism had always been a sham; an intellectual shortcut, a means of appearing above it all without having to do the work of addressing the world as it actually was. All his cant about ever-upward societal evolution ought to have undone his reputation after the Great War, but he’d slipped quickly into the role of world historian and hardly anybody remembered that this was the same man who’d written a book called The War That Will End War in 1914.

With the arrival on the world stage of a genocidal madman determined to create a very different kind of world government from the one Wells had envisioned, he was ill-equipped to handle the situation. As it was, he spent the latter 1930s drafting a useless declaration about human rights, promoting the virtues of birth control, and arguing (if that’s the right word) that Jewish culture was ultimately to blame for Germany’s messianic delusions. Wells was by no means a Nazi sympathizer; he denounced the Munich Agreement and, as a British citizen, loyally supported his country’s war efforts, as he had done during the first war. But as an intellectual, as a man whose job it was to write about ideas, he was what he had always been: a talented but purely self-serving dilettante, incapable of going more than half way in anything.

Some time after his funeral in 1946, Wells’s three sons decided to scatter the old man’s ashes at sea. Starting at Poole Harbour, in Dorset, they “intended to go some way out to sea, but, having run into choppy water, they instead emptied out the ashes just off Studland.” Somehow that seems appropriate.