H G Wells

Activities

Before Viewing / Reading

Find out what you can about living conditions for both the rich and the poor in Victorian England. If you have Internet access, it may be useful to check the Education resources for secondary schools about Victorian Britain at the Public Record Office website (www.pro.gov.uk).

Science fiction is a style (or 'genre') of writing that was invented many years before The X-Files or Star Trek came to the screen!

In small groups, discuss the following questions, and jot down your conclusions:

• What are the main ingredients of sci-fi books, films and TV programmes? What do you think a 'genre recipe' for science fiction would contain?
• What other books, films and TV programmes can you name that deal with time travel, mutation, or alien invasion (the main themes of the three books by H G Wells you are going to study)?
• Why do you think science fiction still fascinates readers and viewers? Why has it remained a common genre for over 100 years? What is its appeal and what are its possibilities?

After Viewing / Reading

Teacher notes

• Devise a list of questions relating to the novels. Appoint three pupils to make up a panel of judges and divide the rest of the class into two teams. Ask individuals from each team to choose a type of question:
• Knowledge: requires simple recall of factual information from the novel (worth 1 point);
• Interpretation: involves expanding facts and offering some insight/explanation (worth up to 3 points);
• Judgement: requires opinion supported by evidence from the text (worth up to 5 points).

This activity is designed to assist with revision of the novels and to raise awareness of the types of examination questions.

'I could see people who had been with me in the river scrambling out of the water through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through grass from the advance of man... In another moment the huge wave, well nigh at the boiling point, had rushed upon me.'

• What have other literary authors predicted about the future?
  (George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World offer a pessimistic answer to scientific optimism. Other writers to consider could be Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Carl Sagan and Jules Verne.)
• How far do the poems To a Conscript of 1940 by Herbert Reid and The Case for The Miners by Siegfried Sassoon lend credibility to Wells’ dark visions of the future?
• How did Wells use his knowledge of science in the fiction he wrote? Assess the importance of the science for the narrative.

• The programme explained the reaction to Orson Welles’ version of The War of the Worlds on American radio, 30 October 1938. By using local references, and real geographical detail, script a modern radio (or television) broadcast of H G Wells’ story aimed at causing panic in your district!
• Look again at the beginning of The War of the Worlds:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us...

Continue the story in a way different from Wells’ version. What happens next? Write just the first chapter.

• Branching stories: in groups, identify a key moment of your story which determined the next event of the narrative. Using the key moment as a starting point, each group member writes an alternative outcome for the narrative. Consider the similarities and variations in the various plots.
• Read the following extract from The Time Machine. What makes the story seem plausible? Consider also the part similes and metaphors play in Wells’ writing.

It was at ten o'clock today that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs Watchett came in, and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback – of a helpless headlong motion. I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darkness, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green: they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun-belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.

('Time Travelling', The Time Machine)

• Discuss the narrative perspective of the novel. Adapt its first person elements to the third person and consider the effects.
• Taking the themes of The Invisible Man – mutations and scientific research – write your own story based on some recent scientific development that could become dangerous.
• If you have seen a film version of a Wells novel, write a critical review of the film (comparing the elements of the film to the novel) and the strengths of the two formats.
• If time-travellers from a past or future century (or both?) suddenly arrived at your home, what would you tell them about life today? What point(s) would you try to make? How do you imagine your visitors would react? Would they want to stay here?

• Choose one aspect of today's society (for example, new digital technology, satellite television, road gridlock or the increased division between the rich and the poor) and take it to its extreme, to something that could develop in future years. Write a story based on this future. Think about your themes and your message. What point are you trying to make?
• Imagine you are asked to select the contents of a time capsule that is going to be sent into the future. What objects or messages would you place inside, and why?

• Choose a major historical era such as the French Revolution, Medieval or Roman Britain, or the Stone Age. From the library or Internet, find out all you can about the period. Imagine you are able to travel back to such a time. What might you tell people about your own time? Write a story based on this idea (presented, perhaps, as a love story, an adventure story or a horror story.) Think about your themes and your message. What point are you trying to make?
• What and how might people read in the future?
• Why does H G Wells deserve his reputation as the 'Father of Science Fiction’? Note that several other contemporary writers also predicted world war. Consider the following information before coming to your conclusions:

1870: for his novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne invented a submarine, and he sent man into space From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and A Trip Round The Moon (1870). In his writing, Verne's moon rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, travelled at 25,000mph and returned to earth by splashing down in the North Atlantic, the crew being recovered by a warship. Exactly one century later, each of Verne's predictions proved to be precisely correct!

1820: Washington Irving published the story of Rip Van Winkle, who woke from a 20 years’ sleep to find the world had greatly changed.

1818: in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley considered the horrific consequences of scientifically creating a living creature.

1726: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels offered fantastic adventures among alien creatures in strange lands.

6^th Century AD: Gregory of Tours told the tale of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Seven young Christians, imprisoned by the Emperor Darius (250 AD), woke from a 187 years’ sleep to discover that the world was a much changed place. (The story is also recounted in the mid-seventh century Koran.)

2^nd Century AD: Greek satirist, Lucian of Samosata, wrote a tale in which his hero’s ship was hurled by a storm into space and onto the Moon, where he discovered enemies at war.

• Pretend that you are H G Wells and describe the part of your writing that was the most fun or hardest to write. Explain why.
• Write several diary entries made by one of the major characters.
• Make a crossword puzzle from an H G Wells book. Try it out on class friends!
• In a small group, select a character from your reading and make a list of this character's traits. If the character were to write a letter to another character – either in the same book or another book – what would that letter be about? Each member of the group writes a sample letter. Groups can then share their letters and discuss character traits or display the letters (with character names omitted) and invite others to identify who the characters are. Different characters might then correspond with each other (pupils write both letters, or use partners).

• If Wells was writing his books today, do you think he would want to make any changes?