If science fiction as a recognizable genre is a product of the twentieth century, its constituent parts were born of the nineteenth. While some may argue over Mary Shelley's place as the mother of SF, there can be little argument over who the father is. It all started in England, on the periphery of the twentieth century...
Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. Unlike many famous writers, he was not born into a literary family. Rather his parents owned a small china shop; and it looked for a while—as he took his first job in a draper's shop—like he would be just another in a line of merchants or laborers. His literary genius not yet tapped, the world would have to wait until he was nearly thirty for the first words of modern SF to flow from his pen.
Before his first book, The Time Machine, was published in 1895, Wells became a teacher. He educated himself as he made his way through these early years of his life, and then, one day, an author was born. It was on a day in 1895 when, for the price of one hundred pounds, the manuscript for The Time
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