September 21 - Birthday of H.G. Wells (Father of Sci Fi)

H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

This day was born in 1866, in Bromley, England, writer H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, father of Futurism and Sci Fi. He was born to shopkeeper parents who were not successful and had to give up their store. Instead, his mother worked as a housekeeper on an estate with a large library, from which she brought books to young H.G. to read. He was sickly as a child and his older sister died in childhood.

He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science and this set him up for a life writing on scientific themes, with a focus on predicting and envisioning the future.

Wells' first book in the Sci Fi genre was The Time Machine (1895), which was an instant success. It is a look at the human race many millennia from now.  The narrator is called simply "the Time Traveller". The book has been described as a ghost story that takes Darwinian theories and spins them way out into the future.

He followed up with The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), about an island where a scientist is engaged in what we might call genetic experimentation with animals. An excerpt from Hitchcock's 1938 movie based on The War of the Worlds (1898) was read out by Orson Welles on Halloween two weeks after the movie came out. While it was famously so realistic that listeners who tuned in late were panicked about the purported invasion from outer space, it wasn't considered a success - which prompted Welles to say goodbye to radio and take up movies, starting with the masterpiece,  Citizen Kane (1941).

Wells had a genuine interest in science, which was married to a socialist vision for the future. In The War in the Air (1908), he predicted World War I and use of airplanes to wage war, which came true. His post-Einstein novel The World Set Free (1914) described bombs with successive explosions tied to their radioactivity, which inspired scientific initiatives to achieve a nuclear chain reaction, leading to the atom bomb.

In his nonfiction three-volume History of the World (1920) he predicted that innovations in horseless railway transportation would permit larger cities. Wells is even said to have anticipated the Internet, long before Al Gore or Oxonian Tim Berners-Lee (more formally, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS), when in the 1930s he espoused an encyclopedia that anyone could read and at the same time edit.

The success of his predictions in both his nonfiction and fictional books is something he took great pride in pointing out. In the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, he said in the preface:

[M]y epitaph,... when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: "I told you so. You damned fools."

Wells died in London in 1946, less than one month before his 80th birthday.

VAN STOCKUM | Time Bomber by Robert Wack

Dr. Robert Wack and Alice Tepper Marlin. Photo by
JT Marlin. 

June 9, 2013–Time Bomber is a book about a bomber pilot who takes part in the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

Written by Robert Wack, it is about to be released by Boissevain Books. This is a story about love, regrets, destiny and redemption, during the decisive battles of the invasion of Normandy in 1944, 69 years ago.

The central character is Willem Jacob van Stockum, a brilliant University of Maryland mathematics professor. It is based on a true story about a man who abandoned a promising academic career and became an unlikely RAF bomber pilot in World War II. 

After surviving a merciless training program, he flew six missions before and after the D-Day invasion of Europe. When his plane is shot down on June 10 behind the lines over Normandy, Wack presents a sci-fi angle to make this the genre that he wants the book to be classified in.

While they fight for survival in the French countryside, they meet up with ruthless French Resistance fighters and two strangers who are not what they seem. Willem’s pioneering academic work on time travel and Einstein's Theory of Relativity pose intriguing “what if?” questions compelling him to face the implications of his work and the consequences of choices in a universe of infinite possibilities.

The author, Maj. Robert Wack, is a pediatrician in Maryland. He consulted closely with relatives of Willem van Stockum to get the historical parts of the book right. The book is faithful to the real life of Willem J. van Stockum, who was my mother's brother. Order in paperback or in Kindle version from Amazon.