H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born 21 September 1866 and trained early in biology, a grounding that shaped his Darwinian view of ethics and society. He wrote more than forty novels and dozens of short stories, but the works that secured him were the science fiction he published in a five-year burst: The Time Machine in 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, The War of the Worlds in 1898. He made the impossible feel plausible by anchoring each story in commonplace detail around one fantastic premise - "Wells's law" - earning Joseph Conrad's 1898 tribute: "O Realist of the Fantastic!". An outspoken socialist and futurist, he spent much of his later life writing social commentary and political tracts, pivoting from novelist to public intellectual, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. He co-founded what became Diabetes UK in 1934 and died 13 August 1946, having foreseen aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapons, and something close to the World Wide Web.