Where to Start with H.G. Wells: A Reading Guide
Where to start with H.G. Wells — how to approach The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and his other scientific romances. A complete reading guide to the father of science fiction.
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was a British writer who produced the foundational texts of modern science fiction between 1895 and 1901 — The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds — before moving into social satire and political writing for the rest of his long career. The “scientific romances” (the term he preferred to science fiction) were not escapist adventures but political arguments dressed in speculative form: each uses a scientific premise to examine Victorian class structure, imperial ideology, or the fragility of civilisation from a perspective that literal realism could not achieve.
Where to Start: The War of the Worlds (1898)
The essential H.G. Wells — and the most politically precise of his scientific romances. The War of the Worlds opens on a Surrey summer evening as Martian cylinders begin arriving from the sky and continues through the systematic destruction of Victorian England by tentacled beings in tripod war machines. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who witnesses the invasion from the beginning and moves through the collapsing landscape of civilisation with a mixture of journalistic precision and unravelling composure.
The colonial reversal is the novel’s central political act. Victorian England in 1898 was the centre of the most powerful empire in history, accustomed to projecting technological and military force over peoples who could not match it. Wells’s Martians simply do the same thing to England that England had been doing to its colonies: they arrive with superior technology, view the natives as inferior beings of no particular moral concern, and begin clearing the territory for their own use. The heat-ray and the Black Smoke are not more brutal than the weapons used in colonial campaigns; they are simply more efficient. Wells forces his readers to feel what this looks like from the receiving end.
The pacing is relentless. Wells never allows England — or the reader — to find its footing. The moment the military seems to have a response, the Martians adapt or advance; the moment survival seems possible, the landscape shifts again. The novel moves through five distinct phases of collapse, and each phase strips away another assumption about civilisational resilience.
The resolution — bacteria, not human resistance, destroys the Martians — is simultaneously Wells’s most scientifically precise choice and his most pointed. The Martians, who had no immunity to earthly micro-organisms, were killed by the natural world’s indifference to their superiority. Human beings survived not because of military courage or technological ingenuity but because of organisms too small to see — a reminder, delivered with Wells’s characteristic dry precision, that nature does not recognise the hierarchies that intelligent beings construct.
Why The War of the Worlds Is a Great Place to Begin
For a reader new to H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds is a great place to begin because it is among his most famous and influential novels and a perfect showcase of his distinctive gifts, the visionary imagination, the gripping storytelling, and the social and philosophical undercurrents that lift his work above mere adventure. The War of the Worlds imagines a devastating Martian invasion of Earth, following an ordinary narrator through the collapse of civilization before an overwhelming alien power. As a first Wells, it is hard to better: it is short, propulsive, and founded an entire tradition of alien-invasion fiction. It welcomes the newcomer with its terrifying premise, its vivid scenes of catastrophe, and its underlying reflection on empire, complacency, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Because it is among his most celebrated works, it lets the new reader meet Wells at his most thrilling and characteristic. For the newcomer, then, The War of the Worlds is an excellent door into his pioneering science fiction.
What to Expect When You Open It
As a new reader, you can expect The War of the Worlds to be a gripping, vivid, and thought-provoking work of pioneering science fiction. You can expect a terrifying premise, for the novel imagines a devastating Martian invasion of Earth. You can expect an ordinary narrator, for the story follows a regular man through the collapse of civilization, lending it immediacy. You can expect vivid scenes of catastrophe, for Wells renders the destruction and panic with startling power. You can expect social and philosophical undercurrents, for the novel reflects on empire, human complacency, and humanity’s small place in the cosmos. You can expect a propulsive, accessible story. You can expect the founding work of alien-invasion fiction, endlessly imitated since. Expect, in short, a gripping, vivid, and thought-provoking work of pioneering science fiction, a thrilling first taste of Wells.
Where to Go From Here
Once The War of the Worlds has shown you Wells’s gifts, the reader who wishes to continue can explore his other scientific romances, the pioneering novels that helped found science fiction. The Time Machine, his brilliant short novel of a journey into the far future, is the natural companion and an essential next step, while The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man render his visionary imagination and his social and philosophical concerns in further unforgettable forms. Beyond his science fiction, Wells wrote prolifically across fiction and nonfiction, including social comedies and works of history and ideas. Reading onward deepens your sense of Wells’s central gifts, the visionary imagination, the gripping storytelling, and the engagement with society and humanity’s fate. Building a reading journey through Wells means following his scientific romances from The War of the Worlds into The Time Machine and his other classics. The reader who begins here and continues will encounter one of the founding fathers of science fiction.
The Companion Novella: The Time Machine (1895)
The Time Machine is Wells’s first and most prescient scientific romance — a 118-page novella about a Victorian inventor who travels to the year 802,701 and finds humanity has diverged into two degenerate species: the Eloi, frail and childlike, living in crumbling palaces and eating fruit; and the Morlocks, subterranean workers who tend the machines below ground and eat the Eloi at night. The capitalist class/working class division of Wells’s own era has had 800,000 years to reach its logical conclusion.
The novel ends on one of the most melancholy images in science fiction — the Time Traveller sitting on a cold shore watching the sun dim toward a red giant as the last creatures crawl over the rocks — and the sadness is entirely earned. Wells is not writing optimism about human potential; he is writing about what comfortable exploitation tends toward.
For the full H.G. Wells bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the H.G. Wells author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with H.G. Wells?
The War of the Worlds (1898) is the recommended starting point — Wells's most politically pointed and narratively compelling scientific romance. At 160 pages it is short, relentlessly paced, and makes its argument about empire and civilisational fragility with precision. It invented the alien invasion genre and remains the most intelligent version of it.
What is The War of the Worlds about?
The War of the Worlds follows an unnamed narrator through the initial Martian landings in the English countryside, the deployment of their tripod war machines and heat-rays, and the rapid collapse of Victorian civilisation under technologically superior attack. Wells's central satirical move — placing the English in the position of the colonised, experiencing from the inside what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a force that views you as inferior — remains the novel's most powerful and most underappreciated quality.
In what order should I read H.G. Wells's scientific romances?
Start with The War of the Worlds (1898) for its political precision and narrative drive, then The Time Machine (1895) for its devastating class critique and surprisingly bleak ending, then The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) for its examination of the line between human and animal. The Invisible Man (1897) is lighter in tone but shares the same interest in the consequences of transcending ordinary human limits. All four are short (under 200 pages each) and can be read in any order after the first.
What should I read after H.G. Wells?
After H.G. Wells, Jules Verne provides the other founding pillar of science fiction — more interested in technological adventure than political critique. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is the most direct twentieth-century descendant of Wells's extraterrestrial themes, written with a different emotional register. John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids continues the British tradition of catastrophic civilisation collapse that Wells established.
