Cartographer of Futures
A novelist who used imagined worlds to question his own. Beyond time machines and invaders, he dreamed of knowledge held in common.
Novelist & Imaginer of Shared Knowledge
H. G. Wells made the future a setting for questions about the present. In The Time Machine, a traveller encounters a humanity transformed by time and division. The invention opens an imaginative experiment: what might familiar habits and inequalities become if allowed to continue?
His scientific romances made him famous. Across his wider writing, the organisation of society, education and knowledge became recurring concerns.
World Brain gathers Wells’s proposals for an evolving world encyclopaedia. He wanted knowledge to be reviewed, organised and widely available, with education and public understanding at its centre.
The proposal is ambitious and open to challenge. Who would decide what counted as knowledge? How would the institution revise itself? Those questions make it a useful beginning for a history of shared information.
Wells died in 1946. His novels and essays leave different ways into his imagination: one through stories that unsettle progress, another through programmes for a more informed society.
Read World Brain beside The Time Machine. The distance between a hopeful proposal and a disturbing future is part of what makes his work worth returning to.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinAnother conception of a world that thinks together
Vannevar BushFrom a world reference work to personal trails through knowledge