The H.G. Wells Society was founded by Dr. John Hammond in 1960. It has an international membership, and aims to promote a widespread interest in the life, work and thought of Herbert George Wells. The society publishes a peer-reviewed annual journal, The Wellsian, and issues a biannual newsletter. It has published a comprehensive bibliography of Wells’s published works, and other publications, including a number of works by Wells which have been out of print for many years.
The Society organises a weekend conference each year where aspects of Wells’s life and work are discussed in a congenial atmosphere.
Topics discussed in recent years have included:
- The Short Stories of H.G. Wells
- Publishing and Publicising Wells
- Wells’s Literary Friendships
- The War of the Worlds (The proceedings of this conference appear in Foundation 77)
- Wells and his Critics
- Literature at War: H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and Their Contemporaries
- When the Lights Went Out: H.G. Wells and His World on the Eve of the War
- Anticipations: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions
In addition, the Society has organised two major international conferences. The first, under the title, H.G. Wells under Revision, was held in 1986 to mark the 40th anniversary of Wells’s death; the second, The Time Machine: Past, Present and Future was held in 1995 to mark the centenary of the publication of Wells’s first scientific romance.
Society Founder: Dr. John Hammond
President: Professor Patrick Parrinder
Vice-Presidents: Dr. Stephen Baxter, Dr. Sylvia Hardy, Professor David Lodge, Professor Bernard Loing, Dr. Michael Sherborne, Professor Dominic Wells, Professor Adam Roberts, Claire Tomalin, Dr. Simon J. James
– The Constitution of the H.G. Wells Society –
Society officers:
Chairperson – Mark Egerton
Secretary – Brian Jukes
Treasurer – Eric Jukes
Editor of The Wellsian – Dr. Bill Cooke
Managing editor of The Wellsian – Dr. Maxim Shadurski
Editor of the Newsletter – Eric Jukes
Membership, Publications, Distribution, Sales – Eric Jukes
Webmaster – Charles Keller
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Our 2025 conference is now scheduled for 27 September in Islington. The Call for Papers is linked here and posted under our Events tab above.
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New Freethought History Webinar with our own Dr. Bill Cooke:
What does H. G. Wells offer today?
H. G. Wells has suffered a slump in his reputation since his death in 1946. And yet he has some very valuable things for 21st century people to understand. In a way Yuval Noah Harari and others have spoken of recently, Wells understood that humanism needs to change if it is to adapt successfully to 21st century conditions.
Bill Cooke is editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Wellsian and is author of H G Wells and the Twenty-first Century (Liverpool University Press, 2023). Among his other works is A Wealth of Insights: Humanist Thought Since the Enlightenment (Prometheus, 2011), a biography of Joseph McCabe, and a history of the Rationalist Press Association.