Wells is one of the few English writers to be well read in modern science and in the scientific method; he was also ambiguously persuaded both of the advantages of a socialistically and scientifically planned future and of the inherently anti-humanist bent of certain aspects of scientific progress.
His science-fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1898), still function as alarmist prophecies a century after their first publication.
In The Time Machine (1895), a long short story in which a time traveler makes weird excursions into the future, he created a new kind of art, full for all its strangeness and unreality, of a deep human appeal. Then in The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) he gave a most astonishingly vivid and moving account of a Martian invasion of the earth. In two other romances, The Food of the Gods (1904) and in the Days of the Comet (1906), socialistic ideas began to intrude.