SOURCE: "H. G. Wells and the Scientific Imagination," in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 65, No. 3, Summer, 1989, pp. 390-400.

In the following essay, Wagar estimates the influence of the writings of H. G. Wells on two great scientists of the twentieth century.

One of the rarest birds in the lands of literature is the scientist who writes novels. In mainstream fiction, such a creature is almost unknown. As C. P. Snow observed in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), modern civilization is split in two. The scientists go one way, the humanists another, and those who would travel with both (like Snow himself, a novel-writing scientist) court the condemnation of both.

But one courageous band of writers straddles the two cultures ineluctably, no matter what the training or allegiance of its members. Their patron saint is H. G. Wells, and their craft is science fiction, the fiction of science...