Episode Details

In October 1940, an aging H.G. Wells sat across from a 25-year-old Orson Welles in a San Antonio radio station, the author of The War of the Worlds meeting the broadcaster whose adaptation had panicked a nation. This episode traces the life behind that moment, beginning in Bromley in 1866 with a failing china shop, a father who kept the family afloat playing professional cricket, and a broken leg at age eight that confined a boy to a bed full of library books. When the father's own leg fractured, the family collapsed and Wells was sent into 13-hour shifts as a draper's apprentice.

We follow his escape through a scholarship to study biology under Thomas Henry Huxley while nearly starving, the 1895 breakthrough of The Time Machine, and his rule that a story may contain only one impossible assumption surrounded by mundane detail. We examine the contrast between the ordered worlds he wrote and his turbulent personal life, including marriages to his cousin and to his student Jane, affairs with Rebecca West and Amber Reeves, and the Russian aristocrat Moura Budberg who cared for him but refused to marry him. Then we trace his 1914 novel The World Set Free, which coined the atomic bomb and inspired physicist Leo Szilard's theory of the chain reaction, his meetings with Roosevelt and Stalin, his eugenics advocacy and later retraction, the World Brain concept that anticipated the internet, his place on the Nazi arrest list, and the bitter epitaph he proposed after Hiroshima.

• The broken leg, the library books, and the drapery shop that shaped a young visionary
• Studying under Darwin's bulldog while malnourished, and the law of one impossible assumption
• Marriages, affairs, and the suspected double agent who nursed him at the end
• How The World Set Free gave Leo Szilard the conceptual seed for the nuclear chain reaction
• Eugenics, the World Brain, Stalin, the Nazi Black Book, and a futurist's final pessimism