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Anticipations:
H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions
8-10 July 2016
H. G. Wells Conference Centre, Woking, UK
Organised by the H. G. Wells Society
Plenary Speakers: Stephen Baxter and Lesley A. Hall

H. G. Wells was a novelist, social commentator and utopianist, and is regarded as one of the fathers of science fiction. His early scientific romances featured time travel, mad scientists, alien invasion, space travel, invisibility, utopia, future war and histories of the future: his mappings of the shape of things to come was an overture to over a century of science fiction.

We wish to mark the 150th and 70th anniversaries of Wells’s birth and death respectively by exploring his science fiction, his precursors and successors and his lasting influence upon the genre in print, on film, on television, on radio, online and elsewhere. This is especially appropriate because the event will be held at the H. G. Wells Conference centre in Woking, the town where Wells wrote The War of the Worlds. Many of his ideas on politics, science, sociology and the direction in which he feared humanity was going were contained in his early science fiction and ran through his later influential work.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • specific individual or groups of novels/stories;
  • the connections between Wells’s fiction and nonfiction, including his political, utopian and scientific writings;
  • utopia/dystopia;
  • histories of the future;
  • precursors to Wells’s sf;
  • sf writers influenced by Wells;
  • sequels by other hands;
  • adaptations into other media.

Please send a brief biography and an abstract of 400 words for a twenty minute paper by 15 April 2016 to andrewmbutler42@gmail.com.

Further details will be available from anticipations2016.wordpress.com.