H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies

Keith Williams is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Dundee University. He recently acted as a consultant for BBC 4's trilogy of programmes on the history of British Science Fiction, The Martians and Us. Previous publications include British Writers and the Media 1930-45 (London: Macmillan/New York: St Martins Press, 1996)

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Wells’s Prescience1 Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories2 The Dis/Appearance of the Subject: Wells, Whale and The Invisible Man3 ‘Seeing the Future’: Visual Technology in When the Sleeper Wakes and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis4 The ‘Broadbrow’ and the Big Screen: Wells’s Film Writing5 Afterimages: Adaptations and InfluencesConclusion NotesBibliographyIndex

Williams's study captures Well's interaction with cinema comprehensively. The Wellsian, No. 31 2008 Wellsian scholars will appreciate H. G. Wells: Modernity and the Movies for its freshness and insight. The book also provides an excellent framework for a course on Wells that studies the interactions for his work in written and cinematic forms. Science Fiction Studies, Volume 35 2008 Keith Williams's H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies reckons in very different terms with another figure who carried his Victorianism into the twentieth century, Williams looks not only at Wells's actual writings about and engagements with early cinema but also at ways in which his work anticipated-or, indeed, pioneered-"filmic" techniques and habits of perception before film itself had fully arrived. Here the book joins recent work in media studies that seeks to uncover the technological infrastructures of historical ways of seeing and feeling. While never quite free of the risk of retroactively conforming its object of study to a subsequently apparent development path, Williams's close readings of the links with particular optical technologies and efforts in Wells's writing are never less than resourceful and engaging. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Nineteenth Century Volume 50, Number 4 2010