H.G. Wells, Inventor of Tomorrow

The stupefyingly prolific H. G. Wells published more than a hundred books and slept with “well over a hundred women in his lifetime.” But who’s counting? David Lodge, that’s who. Some of Wells’s works, including the briskly entertaining science fiction classics “The Time Machine” and “The War of the Worlds,” are as familiar as any in English; others, like the appallingly named novel “The Bulpington of Blup” (you can look it up) have sunk from view.