H.G.Wells' fantastic transport by Prof. Simon James
- Dates
- Thursday 26 May 2016 at 1:00 PM
- Venue
- The Lightbox
- Admission
- Booking fee applies
H.G.Wells’ Fantastic Transport
Simon James, Professor of Victorian Literature and Head of the Department of English Studies at Durham University, is editor of The Wellsian, the academic journal published by the H.G. Wells Society. He is a specialist in Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction in particular, and in forms of narrative more generally. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative Form in the Novels of George Gissing (2003) and Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (2012) and the co-editor of The Evolution of Literature and George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent (2013).
Science fiction writer H. G. Wells was obsessed with technologies of transport. From the humble bicycles of The Wheels of Chance and The History of Mr. Polly, to the moving walkways and gliders of When the Sleeper Wakes, from the ‘Land Ironclads’, which foresees the tank, to the Martians’ tripods in The War of the Worlds, and to the eponymous Time Machine, which itself, in turn resembles a bicycle, Wells was always imagining new ways for human beings to get to places (or times) more quickly. This talk will consider the role of the bicycle in particular in Wells's fiction, and its importance in social mobility and in that most important of human activities, reproduction.
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