NARRATOR: If ever a man
was ahead of his time, it was HG Wells. Obsessed with the future,
he dreamed up a machine that could take him there. His ideas were shockingly
advanced, especially about sex, ideas he attempted to
live out in two marriages and countless affairs. His ideas were also highly
prophetic, especially his ideas about the crisis
looming over the future of man. Today, man is successfully
probing deep into the mysteries of the universe. Can he penetrate the
greatest mystery of all-- time itself? NARRATOR: HG Wells
will always be known as the author of "The
Time Machine," "The War of the Worlds," and other
disturbing fantasies that laid the foundation of
modern science fiction. Writing at the end of the 19th
century, he was among the first to see and understand the
shadow of disaster hanging over the 20th century,
the very new and very real possibility of complete
destruction for the Earth and mankind. He was a spectacular dominating
figure for more than 40 years, one of the most famous
and charismatic writers of his time, an acclaimed
novelist, historian, futurist, social critic, and pioneering
champion of sexual freedom and women's rights. But most of all, HG
Wells was a prophet torn between a 20th century
vision of catastrophe-- he forecast the atom bomb
and both world wars-- and a belief in the utopian
evolutionary promise of man. Which shall it be? [music playing] Herbert George Wells began
his travel through time on September 21, 1866. He was born in Bromley, Kent,
a small town outside of London, and he was born into Victorian
England, a society in which his place was fixed
at the lower end. Wells's parents belonged
to the downstairs world of Victorian society. His mother Sarah had been a
lady's maid, his father Joseph a gardener. The couple put their life
savings into a china shop called Atlas House. But business was never good,
and young Wells grew up in the basement of the store. A dismal unsanitary hole is
how he would remember it. He spent hours looking up
through a grating at the people walking by, a boot's eye view of
the world that he never forgot. When he was seven,
Wells broke his leg. The normal therapy of that
time was to put it in a cast and then lie for months,
sometimes three months, before you came out of the cast. Wells, all he could do
was lie and read books. But reading those books opened
up an immense world for him. He called it several
times himself a turning point,
"my lucky moment." NARRATOR: Surrounded by books,
Wells's imagination soared. By the time he was 10, he
was writing and illustrating his own full length novels. "The Desert Daisy" is
the only one to survive. DAVID SMITH: "The
Desert Daisy" is an example of Wells at his
masterful best as a child, I think. It is a strip cartoon,
but it's also a novel. To do it at 10 years old
is absolutely incredible. And the pictures still stand up,
and the text is actually worth reading. Now, this book is amazing. It has a title page, a
editor's preface, and preface to the first edition. "Dear reader, you have
in your hands 'The Desert Daisy,' a romance
of the olden time. I am not at all
vain, but still I think that if this book is
not read when Shakespeare is forgotten, it will have
been grievously ill-treated." NARRATOR: Despite his talent,
Wells's prospects were bleak. With Atlas House
nearly bankrupt, Sarah Wells was forced to
return to work as a servant. HG, just 13, was
taken out of school and sent to the London
firm of Rodgers & Denyer to become a draper's apprentice. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS):
Now it was my turn to put the books away, give
up drawing and painting and every sort of free
delight, stop writing stories, and serve an employer. I hated this place
from the outset. The life of an apprentice
in late Victorian England was not only dark and
gloomy, the hours were long. They started oftentimes
at 7:00 in the morning, went till 8:00 at night. OLIVER WELLS: He wasn't
good at it at all. And he was criticized because he
would spend time reading books when he should have
been working on the job, and he couldn't keep
accounts properly, and most unsatisfactory
employee. NARRATOR: Not surprisingly,
Rodgers & Denyer dismissed young Bert
Wells after three months. But instead of going
home to Bromley, he joined his mother, who
was now chief housekeeper at a country estate
called Uppark. While Sarah tried to figure
out what to do with him, 13-year-old Wells had
the run of the place, including the mansion library,
and it changed his life. He devoured books by Swift and
Defoe, whose travel fantasies made a lasting impression. And he discovered Plato's
"Republic," a book that spurred Wells to look critically
at his own world. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS): That
was, for me, a very releasing book indeed for my mind. Here was the amazing and
heartening suggestion that the whole fabric of law,
custom, and worship, which seemed so invincibly
established, might be cast into the
melting pot and made a new. NARRATOR: At Uppark, Wells
made another discovery-- a telescope. He sat spellbound night after
night examining the craters of the moon. More than anything,
however, Uppark gave Wells a glimpse
of another world, the upstairs world of
19th century England. I think that HG
Wells was influenced by his stay at Uppark to
realize that his horizons could be greater than they were. He's still oppressed there. That is, he's still part
of the downstairs world. But he sees the upstairs world
and realizes that it's there. He can get to it. NARRATOR: But it won't be easy. After four months, Sarah Wells
again apprenticed young HG to be a draper, this time
at the Southsea Drapery Emporium in Southsea. NARRATOR (AS HG
WELLS): Almost as unquestioning as her
belief in our father was her belief in drapers. She thought that to wear a black
coat and tie behind a counter was the best of all possible
lots attainable by men. At any rate, by men
at our social level. NARRATOR: Barely 14, Wells
was now working the job that he was expected to keep
for the rest of his life, a job that took no account
whatsoever of his talents and dreams.
MAN 1: Get on with it, Wells! MAN 2: Wells, for-- MAN 1: Has anyone seen Wells? MAN 2: But you haven't shown-- NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS): At the
back of my mind growing larger and more vivid, until
it was like the word of the Lord coming to one of his
prophets, was the injunction-- get out of this trade
before it is too late. At any cost, get out of it. By the time he was 15, he
knew that he could not stand it any longer. So he walked from Southsea
to Uppark, about 30 miles, and said to his mother,
I can't do it anymore, and I'm going to kill myself. I'm gone. You must get me out of this. She couldn't believe it. Being a draper was
a wonderful thing. And Wells reiterated his
threat to commit suicide. She then knew the
threat was real. NARRATOR: With Sarah's
reluctant consent, Wells found a job as
a teacher's helper in the small town of Midhurst. At the Midhurst Grammar
School, he taught full-time, but spent every spare
moment studying, inhaling subject after
subject, driven by a sense that this was his chance
not only to learn, but to escape the draper's life. In a kind of learning
frenzy, Wells squeezed an entire
education into two years. DAVID SMITH: I don't
think he slept. I don't see how he
could have slept. Wells won virtually every prize
that was offered in those two years, and they were
on every subject. They were on chemistry,
on physics, on astronomy, on geology, on botany. Anything you name, he took
the test, he won the prize, and pocketed the money. NARRATOR: Wells capped it
off by winning a university scholarship to study in London. What had seemed like
an impossible dream had become reality. Wells had broken through
the rigid boundaries of Victorian society. He would neither be a
servant nor a draper. He was going to be a university
student and a man of science. By the time he was 18, HG
Wells had come a long way from the downstairs world
of his servant parents to the heady possibilities of
science and university life. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS): The
day I walked across Kensington Gardens to the Normal
School of Science and went to the biological
laboratory was one of the great days of my life. I had come from beginnings
of an elementary sort to the fountainhead
of knowledge. NARRATOR: Wells's
years in college were the most
stimulating and important of his intellectual life. His teacher, Thomas
Huxley, was one of the great lights
of British science and a fearless defender
of Charles Darwin. DAVID SMITH: We
know of Huxley today because he was the man who-- who told us what Darwin meant. He was called
"Darwin's bulldog," in fact, because he constantly
defended him everywhere. And Wells found sitting
in the classroom watching him dissect a
rabbit, listening to him talk about science and
listening to him talk especially about
the impact of Darwin, that our species was a product
of a long series of evolution, that we were just a species in
the long history of the world. NARRATOR: Darwin's
theory of evolution had a profound impact
on young Wells. He was fascinated by
the questions it raised about the animal
species known as man, the evolutionary
possibility of extinction, or creative adaptation
and survival. The future especially
intrigued Wells. First published work, appearing
in 1887 in a college journal he helped found, was called "A
Tale of the Twentieth Century." Once again, 10 years after Wells
had written "The Desert Daisy" and other boyish novels,
writing caught his imagination and stirred his dreams. Wells fantasized writing
books, grandiose books that would solve the problems of the
world, a dream he illustrated in a letter to a friend. After college, he found work
in London as a journalist, exploiting his
science background to explain the new discoveries
and inventions that were transforming the city. He worked hard, holding
down two teaching jobs and writing full-time. By 1881, Wells was
supporting his mother, who had been dismissed from Uppark,
and his father, unemployed since the china shop went under. "Little Bertie writing
away for dear life to get little things for
all his little people," he wrote in an illustrated
note to his parents. And Wells had someone else to
support as well, his cousin Isabel, whom he had
met and fallen in love with while still a student. After a seven-year wait,
they married in 1891. The marriage was a
bitter disappointment, foundering immediately
on that most Victorian of battlegrounds-- sex. Wells, the rebel, was full
of unashamed sexual feeling. Isabel was not. NARRATOR (AS HG
WELLS): My imagination had exaggerated the joy of
embracing a woman until it became maddeningly desirable. Isabel was my primary fixation. All the clouded drift of
my desire centered on her. But for Isabel, lovemaking
was nothing more than an outrage inflicted
upon a reluctant womankind. The relationship is
strong to begin with, but Isabel then takes
on the Victorian role that he was fighting against. She's acting now like
a Victorian china doll. He isn't going to
take on those-- those Victorian moralities. In fact, he's already said
they're-- they're gone. He-- he doesn't want that world. In fact, he's going to do
all he can to destroy it. NARRATOR: Overworked
and overwrought, Wells began coughing up blood and had
a physical breakdown in 1893. Diagnosed with TB, he
spent weeks in bed. He entertained himself by
writing and illustrating letters, many of them to a
pretty science student named Amy Catherine Robbins. Like Wells, Miss Robbins
was in full revolt against Victorian
society, and the two were drawn to each other
as allies in their fight against a narrow life. In December 1893, two years
after he had married Isabel, Wells left his wife to
live with Amy Catherine. Unmarried, they lived
as man and wife, taking on Victorian
society as well as their own scandalized families. Robbins's brothers visited Wells
and threatened to beat him up if he didn't marry their sister. My grandmother ran away with
my grandfather, and, you know, this in itself was a-- an extraordinary sort
of liberating thing to do, particularly
because he had a-- he had a wife at the time. They were breaking all
the moral codes there were. And as soon as the
first landlady knew it, she threw them out
into the street. You couldn't do that. It just wasn't done. Wells actually says in
some correspondence, I probably have killed all
of the chance of success, but I have to do it anyway. NARRATOR: In fact, success
was just around the corner. Wells's first book, a
textbook of biology, was published in 1893. HG inscribed it
to Amy Catherine, with a drawing of a
rabbit dissecting a man. Buoyed by his
success, Wells decided to take a daring chance. He put aside his journalism
to work on something he called his
"peculiar treasure," a book about a machine that no
one had ever imagined before, a machine that could
travel through time. "It's my trump
card," Wells wrote. "If it does not
come off very much, I shall know my place for
the rest of my career." By 1895, HG Wells had been
working on a novel about time travel for seven years. A first draft called "The
Chronic Argonauts" appeared in the science school's
journal in 1888. Six drafts later, now calling
it "The Time Traveler," he found a publisher. "Please type in
your best style," Wells, in a buoyant mood,
wrote on top of the manuscript. "The Time Machine," as
it was finally called, was an enormous success. Wells received only 100
pounds for the book, but his reputation was made. The novel was unlike anything
that had been written to that time, a blend
of speculative science and intense imagination. "A science romance,"
as Wells called it. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS):
I'm afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations
of time traveling. I saw trees growing and
changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green. They grew, spread,
shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings
rise up faint and fair and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the
earth seemed changed, melting and flowing
under my eyes. MARTIN WELLS: I don't
think anybody called it science fiction in those days. He practically
invented the genre. I mean, there were people
like Jules Verne and so on. But I think HG's big advantage
was that he was actually a serious scientist who could
extrapolate from what he'd got. NARRATOR: Jules Verne had
also written about science in the future, but Wells's
fantasies were more provocative and disturbing. In "The Time Machine," Wells
took the dry theory of Darwin, which had only been considered
in relation to man's past, and applied it to
his distant future. The time traveler doesn't
just go 100 or 200 years ahead in time, he goes
802,000 years ahead, far enough to find out the
end of the evolutionary drama. And then he goes 30 million
years further and offers a vision of a dying planet. GEORGE SLUSSER: At the
end of the time machine, you go to Entropy Beach, if
you will, where all we see is a red sun and a few crab-like
creatures flopping around. And this is-- this is
the end of history. And yet, the time
traveler comes back. The focus of that novel
is really the present, and there is a sense
that, you know, even though we know the end,
we can still go on and face it, and maybe we can beat it. NARRATOR: Wells followed
"The Time Machine" with a dazzling creative spree,
writing a series of books over the next five years that
established the archetypes of modern science fiction-- "The War of the Worlds,"
"The Island of Dr. Moreau," "The Invisible Man," "The
First Men on the Moon." GEORGE SLUSSER: The major
scenarios of science fiction were really invented by Wells. "The Time Machine," time travel. "War of the Worlds,"
alien encounter. "The Island of Dr. Moreau,"
an extension of the scientist theme. I really don't know
any other writer, be it Cervantes or
Shakespeare, they all worked according
to models that were well-known in their culture. But Wells invented models. It's an astounding
feat of the mind. NARRATOR: And of the will,
Wells worked feverishly during these years. He depicted himself
in one of his drawings as the head of a kind
of writing factory, dropping pages down to Amy
Catherine, to the editors, to the critics. Helping him through
it all, Amy Catherine. They were very close
and worked as a team, cycling through London and
the surrounding countryside together, marking
locations for the Martians to destroy in "War
of the Worlds." She became his most
trusted critic, and Wells awaited her verdict
on everything he wrote. They married after Wells
divorced Isabel in 1895. And they
"collaborated," as Wells put it, in the invention of a
human being, their son George, born in 1941. Another son, Frank,
was born in 1903. By that time, Wells
was prosperous enough to build a home, and his
mother, who was sick, moved in with him. Despite HG's success, she
was never quite convinced that he hadn't
made a big mistake by spurning the respectable
life of a drapery clerk. There was a marvelous story
that he went back to his mother and said, look, you know,
I've made 50 quid writing. And she said, oh,
but Bertie, I do wish you'd taken
a regular trade. And it wasn't until he started
accumulating serious money and building a house and things
like that that she really finally gave up. NARRATOR: In "The
Time Machine," Wells had looked into the future
and caught a vision of a dying world. In 1900, he turned to the other
side of the Darwinian equation to the evolutionary changes
man would have to make in order to survive. In a series of highly
influential prophetic books, Wells described and crusaded
for the necessary new world. His core idea was that
technology had created a single world, that
war from now on would be global with the potential
for global destruction, and that peace and the
planet could therefore only be ensured by the evolution of
a world society and enlightened world state. Wells invented the
term "world state." People didn't know
what the term meant. He projected it,
talked about it. Today, we think about
it all the time, but it's because he put it
there with his writings. NARRATOR: Wells continued
to write fiction, but he put aside his
science fantasies in favor of
autobiographical novels about the downstairs world
from which he had escaped. Forgotten today, books like
"Kipps" and "Love and Mr. Lewisham" were as famous
as "The Time Machine," and Wells was hailed
as a second Dickens. DAVID SMITH (VOICEOVER): He
was thought of as the voice of modern British fiction. His writing was more widely
read than any other single individual in his time. NARRATOR: Wells was also
writing groundbreaking novels about sexual freedom
and women's rights. In books like "The Passionate
Friends" and "Ann Veronica," he drew shocking portraits of
women who rejected marriage and refused to hide
their own sexuality, portraits that helped create
a generation of feminists. DAVID SMITH: In "Ann Veronica,"
to read about a young woman at 18 saying to
hell with her father and going off to live in
London with an older man and then eventually junking
him too, I mean, come on! In Wells's own time, it was his
achievement in this area that-- that was as important as
the science fiction before. The women of his time all
the rest of their lives talked about what reading
HG Wells had done for them. NARRATOR: But Wells was at
his most daring and radical when it came to sex. His essays and
novels on the subject would have raised
eyebrows in the 1960s, attacking the
patriarchal family, advocating birth control,
describing sex of the future as a form of refreshment
for men and women both. Wells was interested in
threesomes and foursomes and whatever it would be. He simply said that the
institution of marriage and the institution of all the
various sacraments were bunk. I mean, he just simply said,
let's throw these things out. Let's go directly to love. Love is an impulse. It's an attraction
between two human beings. NARRATOR: Most shocking of all,
Wells was living out his ideas. His marriage with Amy Catherine
was successful in every area but sex. Like his first wife Isabel, Amy
Catherine was sexually distant, especially after two
painful childbirths. To save the marriage, they
agreed on what Wells described as a "modus vivendi." The agreement was
that he, in fact, could have other relationships
with other women. He could have his [inaudible],,
but he had to come home to her. He had to come home and
spend the weekends with her. He had to be Jane's Bertie,
as it were, when he came home. And really tended to
say, look, I'm not sure that I'm really as enthusiastic
about this sex thing as you are. But if you must do it, I'm not
going to stand in your way, provided you don't
do it underhand and you let me know
what's going on. I think she was a
very modern woman. NARRATOR: In his memoirs, Wells
described himself as a Don Juan among the intellectuals. He had innumerable affairs. Novelist Rebecca West, writer
Violet Hunt, Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, birth control
activist Margaret Sanger, novelist Dorothy Richardson,
and a young student, the daughter of a prominent
socialist, Amber Reeves. Well, at first blush when
you look at HG Wells and Amber Reeves, you think, my god,
he's nearly 50 and she's 19. This doesn't make
much sense at all. Except Amber Reeves
is the new woman. If he had been Pygmalion
constructing her, Amber Reeves would have been
the person he constructed. She was there for
him because she was what he was writing about. NARRATOR: Acting like a heroine
from one of Wells's novels, Reeves declared her
love for him in a field, and the two proceeded to enjoy
what Wells described as "days of insatiable mutual
appreciation." When she became pregnant,
the scandal was enormous. But Wells refused to end
the affair or even hide it. Every week, they would walk
together, she visibly pregnant, through Hyde Park. Amy Catherine knew everything,
was on good terms with Amber, and bought clothes for the baby. Eventually, Amber married an
old friend, a kind of cover-up husband, and Wells continued
to see her until 1912. "I'm afraid I behaved rather
scandalous, but know how mean," he wrote a friend. "Believe everything
scandalous and nothing mean." Since "The Time
Machine," HG Wells had warned of an evolutionary
crisis facing mankind. The crisis came in 1914 in the
form of the First World War. Wells himself had predicted
the means of modern warfare, more or less inventing the
tank in a 1903 novel called "Ironclads," and forecasting
the military use of planes in his book, "The
War in the Air." Despite his socialist
writings and utopian visions, Wells threw himself into
the British war effort. "This was the war that would
end war," he predicted. Britain and the Allies,
horrified by the destruction, would surely use their victory
to build a world state. In fact, it was Wells who
was horrified and quickly disillusioned. As the war dragged on, his hair
began falling out in patches. And he concluded bitterly that
all the nations, including his own, were fighting
for their own advantage, that nations themselves
had become obsolete and a deadly danger to man. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS):
The whole intellectual life of man revolts against this
intolerable, suffocating, murderous nuisance-- the national state. NARRATOR: The war convinced
Wells more than ever of the evolutionary need for
some kind of world government. DAVID SMITH: World War I had
an extraordinary impact on HG Wells because Wells
realized that he had to become the public
missionary toward the world state. No one else was going to do it. No government was
going to do it. And he said, I am going
to take this chance. NARRATOR: In writings
and speeches, Wells campaigned for a league of
free nations, a kind of United States of the world,
with enough real power to take war out of the
hands of individual states. He was bitterly critical of the
actual League of Nations formed in 1920, which
had no such power, and which he dismissed as
a piece of stage scenery. Wells decided to attack
nationalism on a new front-- education. He began writing a book that
might help create a world consciousness, a book so daring
in scope that no one had ever tried to write one
like it before, a history of the entire world. CATHERINE STOYE: Well, it
was the outline of history, of the whole of history, a story
of what really had happened in the world, all the
different civilizations. He did it with a sense
of duty to begin with, not in order to make money, but
because it ought to be done. In fact, it was an
enormous success, and he did make a lot
of money out of it. NARRATOR: Incredibly, Wells
researched and wrote his 1,000-page "Outline of
History" in a single year, a year of fanatical toil. It was published
in 24 installments, and its impact was enormous. DAVID SMITH: In "The Outline
of History," which, by the way, is the second bestselling
book in the 20th century, HG Wells put the history of
the world into 1,000 pages, and it's a page-turner. It's the first time
history really had a meaning for ordinary people. NARRATOR: "Outline of History"
sold two million copies in England and America
in its first year. It made Wells so rich, he began
to live like minor royalty, in the words of
one acquaintance. He was now more famous
and influential than ever. 30 years after
"The Time Machine" and for a completely
different kind of writing, Wells was at the peak of
his influence and fame. Author HG Wells in 1923,
probably doing first draft of another bestselling novel. Famed for his brilliant
"Outline of History," Wells made history
with his amazing pen. NARRATOR: As his fame
grew, so did his notoriety as a womanizer. Women continued to revere
Wells and throw themselves at his feet. One admirer came to his house
wearing nothing but high heels and a raincoat and
slashed her wrists when he tried to put her out. Another woman, Odette
Keun, was more successful. An exotic-looking adventurous
from Constantinople, she wrote passionate letters to
Wells, offering herself to him. "We had an adoration for
him," she would later write. "He was a superstar." They became lovers, and
Wells built a home for her in the south of France. She named it Lou Pidou, her
nickname for HG, "little god." As he had done since his
affair with Amber Reeves, Wells led a kind of double
life, dividing his time between Odette
and Amy Catherine, still living out the
extraordinary terms of their open marriage. Amy Catherine knew all
about Odette and HG, and even bought housewarming
gifts for their home in France. She got rather a rough
deal from HG's philandering around the place. In fact, I think
all the evidence is that she didn't terribly mind. They were a surprisingly
close-knit couple, although HG, from time to time,
took up with other people. NARRATOR: Wells was with
Odette on May 10, 1927, when he got a telegram informing
him that Jane had cancer. Her death five months
later was devastating. Despite HG's
infidelities, their bond had been very strong, going
back all the way to the years before "The Time Machine," when
Amy, or Jane as he preferred to call her, was the other
woman and their romance was a scandal. When Jane died, I believe HG
Wells came to the realization, for the first time perhaps, what
she really had meant to him. She had been the first
woman to love him back in an equal kind of way. The rest of his life working
toward the world state is a life which it doesn't have
the personal intense quality that his life before. Jane's death was profoundly
important and difficult for him to deal with. NARRATOR: After the death
of his wife Amy Catherine, HG Wells began to suffer from
serious, at times suicidal, depression. His affair with Odette
Keun had wound down. He was suffering
from diabetes, and he was dogged by a sense of
failure and wasted effort. The menace of nationalism was
worse than ever, especially in Italy and Germany, where
fascism was on the rise. When Hitler came
to power in 1933, Wells's books were among
the first to be burned. One book the Nazis
tossed into the bonfire was "The Shape of
Things to Come," a fiercely futuristic novel that
was made into a movie in 1936. Wells's book was
eerily prophetic, depicting a world war that began
in 1940 with a German invasion of Poland. Wells also forecast the Blitz
of London, which he presented so realistically that it served
as a kind of national rehearsal for the real thing. DAVID SMITH: When
you look at it, you think you're looking
at World War II scenes. You think you're looking
at the Blitz in London. You forget that
it's a movie set. He has an uncanny understanding
of how people would react. It's a remarkable
piece of prophecy. NARRATOR: "Things to
Come" also brought to life Wells's vision of a
futuristic world state run by an enlightened
elite and strewn with spectacular technology. Just months after the
movie premiere, Wells celebrated his 70th birthday. By now the grand old
man of English letters, he was feted at a gala party
surrounded by friends, family, former lovers, and
literary colleagues. Wells couldn't quite
accept the fact that he was 70 years old,
that his travel through time was winding down. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS):
I feel like a little boy at a lovely party who has been
given quite a lot of jolly toys and who has spread his
play about the floor. Then comes his nurse. "Now, Master Bertie," she
says, "it's getting late. Time you began putting
away your toys." But I don't want to go. I hate being 70. Few of my games are nearly
finished, and some I feel have hardly begun. ANNOUNCER (ON RADIO):
We interrupt our program of dance music to bring
you a special bulletin. At least 40 people are dead. Martian cylinders are
falling all over the country. NARRATOR: On October 30,
1938, rioting broke out across the eastern United States
when Orson Welles broadcast a radio adaptation of HG
Wells's "War of the Worlds." The hollowing radio cast
announced in news bulletins style that Martians had
landed in New Jersey and were killing
people with a heat ray. HG Wells was amused, though not
surprised, by the spectacle. ANNOUNCER (ON
RADIO): --Situation that confronts the country. Orson Welles's radio program
produced a furor and a panic in the United States that Wells
thought was deliciously ironic because it was exactly what
he had predicted when he wrote "The War of the Worlds." He described a
complete public panic. And of course, that happened
in the United States on the next day. NARRATOR: At a radio station
in Texas the following year, HG met Orson Welles. They discussed
"War of the Worlds" and the coming world war. HG WELLS (VOICEOVER):
You weren't quite serious in America yet, and the
consequence is you can still play with ideas of terror. ORSON WELLES (VOICEOVER): Mr.
Wells's future is suddenly upon us, and we are living right
now in that famous HG Wells future. NARRATOR: When Wells
returned to London, World War II had
already broken out. He stayed in London throughout
the war in an apartment next to Regent Park and insisted
on taking his turn patrolling for fires during the Blitz. MARTIN WELLS: He was
fairly bloody-minded. You didn't see any reason why
he was going to be pushed out of London by Adolf Hitler. So he lived in Regent's Park
in the middle of London. And from time to time, the
bombs blew his windows out. My mother told
me the carpenter kept having to come to
mend the front door, which was a great big one. A lot of the V2s, I think,
landed on the Regent's Park, which is just opposite, and
the door kept blowing in. DAVID SMITH: HG Wells remained
in London during the Blitz and during the V
bombs because he thought it was the way
a British person ought to act under stress. And he was well aware of the
rich and the wealthy going to their country homes, and
he wanted to call attention to that. NARRATOR: Living in the
epicenter of a world war he'd been warning
against for a lifetime, Wells continued to
sound the hopeful note. America, Russia, and
the British system, if they took
possession of the air, as they are quite
capable of doing, nothing could withstand them. They could take the
air out of politics, out of international affairs,
and lay the foundations for a world peace that
would endure forever. NARRATOR: His last crusade was
for a universal declaration of "The Rights of Man,"
a document that he wrote and that eventually
became a cornerstone of the United Nations. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS): All my
books, from "The Time Machine" on, insist on the
insecurity of progress, the possibility of human
degeneration and extinction. I think the odds
are against man, but it is still
worth fighting for. GEORGE SLUSSER: That was
the courage of HG Wells. He saw all of these
things very clearly. In fact, as a
writer, depicted them probably in the most austere
and stark fashion imaginable. But then he went on to
believe in human reason, which is incredible. NARRATOR: Privately, Wells
was not holding up so well. He was tormented by a bitter
sense that he had failed and that the world had failed. Finding him alone in
a corner at a party, a friend asked Wells
what he was doing. "Writing my
epitaph," he replied. "God damn you all. I told you so." I think he got a bit
depressed in his last few years because, you know, all
those idealisms about spread of socialism went sour. And people getting
better educated and being more sensible as
a result, that went sour. The whole belief that
the League of Nations was a fine hopeful thing,
that went down the drain. Many of the things that
he actually had faith in had gone bad on him. NARRATOR: With the
revelations of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima,
Wells drifted towards despair. DAVID SMITH: The opening up
of the concentration camps and the total inhumanity of
our species to others, these were the worst culminating
events for HG Wells because he thought that we
hadn't learned anything. NARRATOR: Wells himself had
predicted the atom bomb, describing it in
remarkable detail in 1914 in a novel called
"The World Set Free." The book actually
played a small role in the development of the
bomb, convincing Leo Szilard, a key member of the nuclear
team, that splitting the atom was possible. For Wells, the use
of the A-bomb seemed to answer the question that
had haunted him since the time machine, the evolutionary
question about the destiny of man. After Hiroshima, he painted
a mural behind his apartment showing the forms of life
from dinosaurs to humans. Under the figure of man,
Wells wrote, "time to go." NARRATOR (AS HG
WELLS): With a period to be estimated by weeks and
months rather than by eons, there has been a fundamental
change in the conditions under which life exists. The end of everything we
call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. It is going clean out of
existence, leaving not a wreck behind. NARRATOR: Still, like the hero
in "The Time Machine," Wells behaved as if it were not so. Dying of liver cancer, he went
outdoors for the last time on August 13, 1946, to vote. He died three weeks
later at the age of 79. The memorial service
reflected his life. DAVID SMITH: Virtually everyone
who had been part of his life was there-- legitimate children,
illegitimate children, grandchildren, old girlfriends. Rebecca was there. He was gone. But as one of them said, now
we'll give him to the ages. NARRATOR: After the service,
Wells's oldest son GP, and Anthony West, his son
from his affair with novelist Rebecca West, tossed
his ashes into the sea. HG Wells's amazing travel
through time was over. NARRATOR (AS HG WELLS):
I am English by origin, but I am early world man. And I live in exile from the
world community of my desires. I salute that finer larger
world across the generations, and maybe someone down the vista
may look back and appreciate an ancestral salutation.
