Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine gives a glimpse of the distant future, suggesting that the evolution of humankind is not necessarily progressing toward a more refined species.

Wells's nonfiction book A Modern Utopia (1905) established him as a leading proponent of socialism, world government, free thought, and free love, and as an enemy of the entrenched English establishment.

Charles Darwin's monumentally important study, The Origin of Species (1859), was a huge influence on Wells The book asserts that Homo Sapiens have evolved from other creatures.

Edward Bellamy's classic novel Looking Backward (1888) describes an ideal social and industrial system of the future. Wells was ambivalent about such notions of progress, at times embracing them and at other times suspecting that Bellamy's embrace of the concept of scienu'sm— progress driven by science—was shallow and not in balance with human nature.

"The Bungalow House...