Books: The Days of the Prophet

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H.G. WELLS by NORMAN and JEANNE MACKENZIE 487 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

H.G. Wells continues to be a biographer's dream and a book reviewer's waltz. His life stretched very nearly from Appomattox to Hiroshima. He was one of the world's great storytellers, the father of modern science fiction, an autobiographic novelist of scandalous proportion, a proselytizer for world peace through brain power, an unsurpassed popular historian, a journalist and inexhaustible pamphleteer, the friend and worthy adversary of great men and the lover of numerous beautiful and intelligent women.

But when he died in 1946 at the age of 79, Wells' reputation had long suffered from overexposure. Wells had some cause for gloom. Among the last of his 153 published books was A Mind at the End of Its Tether, a pessimistic essay written in 1945 that gave man little chance for survival. He had lived through two of the most destructive wars in history, a fact that must have frequently been on his mind, since in 1917 he coined the phrase "the war that will end wars." On the other hand, about a decade later he predicted that World War II would start in 1939.

Wells was the last of the high-level saturation prophets. His success as a futurist was based on a supreme confidence in man's worst instincts. For Wells, an atheist, theological good and evil did not exist. Original sin resided in the pinkish gray folds of the brain and expressed itself through brutish linkage, which operated the prehensile thumb. Given tools enough and time, Homo sapiens would turn the most charming toy, the most fetching theory, into a weapon.

Patience is the prophet's greatest ally. In 1900, three years before the Wright brothers puttered over the sand at Kitty Hawk, Wells foretold the modern air armada in The Shape of Things to Come. On the eve of World War I, after reading a book about radium, he wrote The World Set Free, a novel that predicted the atomic bomb with such imaginative precision that the late physicist Leo Szilard acknowledged that the book had inspired the building of his own apparatus for starting chain reactions.

Wells' life was involved in the most important ideas and events of his times, and British Biographers Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie patiently retell it in more detail than has heretofore been marshaled in any single book. Wells was a sickly boy, the son of a servant mother and a father who would rather play cricket than run his failing crockery shop in Kent. Wells escaped from genteel poverty when he moved from draper's assistant to scholarship student at London University in 1884. There he came under the lasting influence of Darwin's disciple, T.E. Huxley. It is not hard to imagine how Wells would be impressed by a theory that made the monkey the common ancestor of kings and cockneys. He was soon mixing Darwinian science and the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer in articles and stories that found ready outlets in Grub Street periodicals.