The Prophet of Science by Partick Parrinder
- Dates
- Thursday 14 April 2016 at 7:00 PM
- Venue
- The Lightbox
- Admission
- Book online
The Prophet of Science: H.G. Wells, Woking and the shape of things to come.
Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and a Vice-President of the H.G. Wells Society. He has written a number of books on H. G. Wells and science fiction, including Shadows of the Future which won the 1996 University of California Eaton Award. He is general editor of the seventeen Wells editions published in 2005 by Penguin Classics, and also of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English currently in publication. His other books include James Joyce (1984) and Nation and Novel (2006), and his study of Utopian Literature and Science was published in 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan.
This talk celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of H. G. Wells looks at the extraordinary achievements -- including the writing of The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds -- that came out of the novelist's brief residence in Woking. Although he only spent 17 months in the town, it was here that Wells laid the foundations of his long career as a science fiction writer and social prophet. With little money and no reserves to fall back upon, he was 'writing for dear life', yet also constantly looking into the future to see things that, as Wells says at the beginning of his most famous novel, 'no one would have believed'... but which continue to enthrall us today.