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Two years later, in 1897, The Invisible Man has the researcher discovering a
technique to make himself invisible - but is unable to reverse the process, lead-
ing to dire consequences. And in 1898, The War of the Worlds has alien invaders
from Mars landing in London and defeating all of England's military might
with deadly heat-ray weapons. The runaway success of these stories, produced
in just three years, has led to Wells being acclaimed as the “Father of Science
Fiction.”
The nineteenth century of Verne and Wells was generally a time of opti-
mism and of belief in the self-evident benefits of advances in science and tech-
nology. One early exception to this utopian view of the future was a short story
by the novelist E. M. Forster. In 1909, he wrote The Machine Stops , which put
forward a much more pessimistic, dystopian vision. In the story, humanity has
become totally dependent on a vast and complex machine - which we would
now call a computer - that manages every aspect of a completely mechanized
environment for society. The story centers on a woman, Vashti, and her son
Kuno. Vashti is content to live her life in her underground, automated apart-
ment, attending meetings and lectures by videoconference, and only rarely
physically meeting people:
Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with
radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons
and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing.
There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation)
marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized
liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced
literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated
with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with
all that she cared for in the world. 3
Kuno rebels against the uniformity of the society and tries unsuccessfully to
go outside, into the open air. Total dependence on the Machine had almost
become a religion. Unfortunately, the number of engineers who understood
the technical workings of the Machine in its totality was decreasing every year.
Eventually, increasing numbers of small defects became common - the music
feeds became unreliable, the bath began to smell - and these were not imme-
diately fixed by the Committee of Mending Apparatus. Finally, the Machine
B.17.2. Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), better known as H. G. Wells, was inspired by
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection as a student. The theme of humanity evolving
according to these inexorable forces is evident in his irst and probably most famous topic, The
Time Mach ine, published in 1895, as well as in many of his later works. He is often credited with
foreseeing the development of the tank, aircraft and air warfare, the atomic bomb, and nuclear
stalemate. Hugo Gernsback reprinted almost all of Wells's novels in his Amazing Stories magazine
and as a result Wells's work was enormously influential on the development of science fiction
in the United States. His topic The War of the Worlds was the first alien invasion story, and Orson
Welles's radio dramatization of it caused a riot in New York in 1938. Toward the end of his life
he had the idea of a distributed encyclopedia that he called the World Brain.
 
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