EVENT OF THE MONTH: SEPTEMBER 2016

This year marks 150 years since the birth of H.G. Wells, one of the nation’s greatest science fiction writers and public intellectuals. His first novel, The Time Machine, was published in 1895, and he saw the coming century clearer than anyone else. He anticipated wars in the air, the sexual revolution, motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs and a proto-Wikipedia he called the 'world brain'.

For Wells, imagining a viable version of the future was an intellectual game. It was a chance to show off, and a seemingly respectable way to be deeply subversive. Writing to his friend Elizabeth Healy, he described Anticipations, his 1901 book of predictions, as ‘designed to undermine and destroy the monarch, monogamy, faith in God and respectability – and the British empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electric heating’. Futurology, for Wells, was exhilarating. The idea that writers would give up even trying was so implausible that Wells never imagined it.

Wells’s genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air. It is not those specific stories that we need now, but the imagination that spawned them. It is hard to find a contemporary author producing stories as new and unprecedented as Wells’s early work, but we should try. Because if it is true that you have to imagine a future before you can build it, then this failure of our imagination is deeply alarming.

His move to Woking in 1895 inspired some of his greatest works, including The War of the Worlds. Wells made Woking infamous in the late 19th Century by making Horsell Common the location for his Martian invasion so to celebrate the Borough’s connection with H.G. Wells, Woking Borough Council and its partners have launched the ‘Wells in Woking’ cultural event programme for 2016. The story of Wells in Woking is one of inspiration, imagination and success.

Link: http://www.celebratewoking.info