Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was born in Bromley, Kent, the son of a shopkeeper and a domestic servant. A scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London brought him under the influence of T.H. Huxley-Darwin's great champion-and gave Wells the scientific grounding that would electrify his fiction for the rest of his life. He published The Time Machine in 1895 at the age of 28, and followed it in rapid succession with The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, four novels that essentially founded the genre of modern science fiction. Unlike the Jules Verne school of adventure-driven invention, Wells was interested in ideas first and technology as a lens for examining class, power, human nature, and destiny.