The chemistry that inspired H.G. Wells

Deciding who was the first science-fiction writer is a popular but in the end fairly meaningless pursuit. Some like to cite Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as the first sci-fi novel; others will go right back to Margaret Cavendish’s outlandish The blazing world (1666). The French writer Jules Verne, author of Journey to the centre of the Earth (1864) and 20,000 leagues under the sea (1870), has a good claim to being the first to pen what is now called hard sci-fi, which tries to adhere only to known science and its plausible extrapolations. But arguably the genre owes most to the Victorian–Edwardian writer who saw no need to let scientific plausibility curb his imagination: H. G. Wells.