Category: The End of the World
Wells was a writer who was anti-war and anti- violence, but whose imagination was very excited by these subjects. He wrote books to improve the world, and also books which showed the world coming to an end if humanity failed to take steps to improve itself.
H. G. Wells. The Time Machine [holograph manuscript, ca. 1894]. Wells TT-001, folio 231In the handwritten draft for chapter 13 of the New Review text of The Time Machine, the Time Traveler takes his machine into the far future beyond 802,701 and witnesses a solar eclipse, which prefigures the heat death of the sun and the extinction of all life on Earth.
View the digitized version of the manuscript.
H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds [holograph manuscript, ca. 1897]. Wells WOW-001, folio 93aIn Wells’s enduringly popular 1898 scientific romance The War of the Worlds, the world comes close to being destroyed when Earth is invaded by the Martians, super-intelligent cyborgs with superior technology and a thirst for human blood. Humanity is only saved by the Martians’ lack of resistance to Earth’s bacteria. The story was first serialized in Pearson’s Magazine: these pages show Wells’s annotations and changes for the first book publication.
View the digitized version of the manuscript.
H. G. Wells. Picshua [sketch] ‘Omaggio to P.C.B.’ [1900]‘P.C.B.’ stands for ‘Phylum, Companion of the Bath,’ a nickname for Wells’s second wife, more usually nicknamed ‘Jane.’
