That's it for today - thank you everyone!
Thank you so much to Ali for giving her time, and to all of you for asking your excellent questions. Ali gives the last word to HG Wells:
'The very notion of the dismantling of human rights is an obscenity.'
Our very own samjordison has a question:
This might be an impossible question to answer briefly, but could you say something about why you think Wells’s The Rights of Man remains so important...
Guardian contributor Hi Sam
Right now they're working on dismantling the Human Rights Act again. The very notion of the dismantling of human rights is an obscenity. Look at the movement of 65 million people across the world. Then look up Shakespeare's speech for the play of Sir Thomas More, its description of refugees, and its final words: "Mountainish inhumanity". Think about Wells's long life and his visionary capability. The man who could see everything coming, and whose visionary acumen proves itself time after time. At the end, facing fascism, in the middle of the second world war, he began drafting what would become, after his death, the UN International Declaration of Human Rights. He was a man who learned from his own history. We have to be sure we don't act numbly and blindly towards ours.
Ali wrote a piece for the Guardian in 2015 about The Rights of Man, if you’d like to read about it further:
trueshortstory says:
I love your writing because of the way you play with form and language, but also because your work contains (and evokes) such genuine emotion. Could you comment on the relationship between form and feeling in your work please?
Guardian contributor hello trueshortstory
Form is the shape that feeling takes. Thank you for your lovely and beautifully-formed question.
'Scottish writing is vibrantly generous, multivoiced, multiformed. What a time to be a reader.'
RabBurnout asks a few questions:
Hi Ali, would it be true to say that you share with Wells a concern with the marginalised in society in your work? Do you like Wells more for his ‘progressive’ ideas than for his novel writing?
I read somewhere that you moved away from Scotland because you felt it wasn’t conducive to your writing - is this true? and if so, why was this?
Are there any past or present Scottish writers who have influenced you? I think I see similarities with quite a few modern Scottish writers, such as Janice Galloway for instance. Do you think you are a part of something in Scottish culture in the 80’s/90’s that enabled this fine body of work to come to fruition? Or do you not feel a relationship with it at all?
Guardian contributor Hello Rab (I like your name).
I love Wells's pull towards the democratic, even at his most pessimistic, his interest in "our collective life", plus his eye for the notion that "our true nationality is mankind". And I like very much how he finds fictional form for things so contemporary they haven't even happened yet. I don't feel like I've ever left Scotland. I'm there all the time. And wherever I am in the world I write because I'm Scottish, and what I write is formed of the time and the place that made me, and the people - above all, if there's any originality in it, it originates in the gift of a Scottish literary inheritance which gives its writers the ability and the tools to do anything they like. Grassic Gibbon, Spark, McIlvanney, Gray, Lochhead, George Mackay Brown - look at the range, vocal and formal, and the engagement of just these few writers; for me it's just the tip of the influence, and I know how lucky I am to have had that gift straight to the bloodstream. Scottish writing is vibrantly generous, multivoiced, multiformed. What a time to be a reader. I remember sitting in a theatre in Aberdeen in 1984 or 5, Kelman and Gray reading to us, and thinking to myself anything and everything is possible now. That's how formative. That's how freeing. That's how part of it I feel. Thank you Rab for asking so kindly.
nosuchzone gets deep:
Is a novel of unfamiliar ideas like a stranger in the house?
Guardian contributor Hello Nosuchzone
Writing anything and reading anything - storytelling itself - it's all about the act of hospitality.
Swelter asks a question that everyone who has read Tono-Bungay has wondered at some point:
How do you pronounce “quap”?
Guardian contributor Swelter, I ask myself the same question. Probably Wells wants us to question the word, and whether it rhymes with crap or not.
Robert Rudolph asks:
Did Wells’ contemporaries interpret “The War of the Worlds” as a jab at imperialism?
Guardian contributor Dear Robert
I don't know. Patrick Parrinder will, though - find one of the Critical Heritage books where they collect reviews and critical pieces, contemporaneous to publication. It's hard to see how his contemporaries could have avoided its clear critique, though.
Rattandy wants to know:
For writers in general, what can we learn from HG Wells of the craft, at whatever stage of experience we are? Also, are there any must-read Wells passages for learning writers?
Guardian contributor Hello Rattandy
We can learn an open double-mindedness. Wells is never one-sided and his idealism and hope are always tempered by pessimism and vice versa. Passages? I like the opening of War of the Worlds.
palfreyman asks:
Which of Wells’ “straight” literature would you say you find the most impressive, and why?
Guardian contributor HI palfreyman
Whatever I read of Wells, I'm left surprised and unpreconcepted. Forgive that new word.
KathrynMartins is a fan:
Ali, I have read Hotel World, Artful and How to Be Both. A friend of mine who does not read living writers is currently loving How to Be Both. This constitutes a crisis. You have unleashed the unexpected and her cat has taken to sleeping across the book. When I read you I am not only at play or part of an experiment or finding warmth or meeting parts of myself or being sung to. There is an utter lack of snobbery in your work that enables it to transcend and to resonate.
Guardian contributor Kathryn
AW! It is very nice to meet you and my very best to your friend and the cat.
Rebekahgordon1 says:
I’m a big fan, of both your fiction and your hybrid/essay-fiction, and I know that you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you were to write one critical essay about Buffy, what would the title be and/or what theme or question would it address?
Guardian contributor Rebekah!
What a lovely question. Title: Penetrate my Heart (from the first song in "Once More with Feeling", of course) Buffy still amazes me - a masterclass in creating an essentially good character whose side we're on - like HG Wells an understanding of heroism as flawed and human. Its theme would be how we are drawn to empathise, sympathise, by stories which get us by the heart and mean a change of heart.
Kudos to machenbach for suggesting an excellent alternative title:
How to Be Both (Vampire Slayer and Teenager)?
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'The library, the "world encyclopaedia" - we need it more than ever right now.'
FrozenWilds asks:
I am reading (and really enjoying) your Public Library collection just now. Are you concerned that classics like Wells’ books will be left behind as libraries shut and as hard copy books become less popular than e-books? I am.
Guardian contributor Hello Frozenwilds
Yes and no. I'm terribly concerned about the loss to all of us of public library richness. But Wells will never be left behind. And hard copy books will never lose out to their cousin e-books. We love books as objects. But we have to be canny now, preserve their availability for all of us, in whatever form. Wells exists because of a culture that worked to form a mass readership and that's why I exist too, and you, and the public library system is a big part of that, a true historic amelioration for all of us. What we need to find is a way to replicate, preserve and adapt that open availability and fairness right now. Wells saw human history as "more and more a race between education and catastrophe". The library, the "world encyclopaedia" - we need it more than ever right now, when education in this country is turning its head towards the selective mode again.
MythicalMagpie says:
I’d like to ask Ali Smith why she likes Wells as a writer. She writes such flowing, stream-of-consciousness, poetic prose. I’d say it’s almost the exact opposite of Wells’ more ponderous, plan and illustrate an idea style.
Guardian contributor Hi Magpie and Eric
I like all the streams, and Wells's stream is deceptive. While he looks like a clunky stage conjurer sometimes, and you're shaking your head at the visible machinations, suddenly you realise that somehow, invisibly, while you were looking elsewhere, he's made magic happen.
'I bet Rebecca West took HG Wells to task every day for his sexism.'
Goldendays49 had a couple of questions directed to the man himself (bit problematic, since he died a while back):
I’d like to ask HG Wells more about his relationship with Rebecca West and what he thinks of Kindle.
Guardian contributor Hello Goldendays
I looked up what he wrote especially for you and it sounds like they had some very golden days together as well as some pretty fierce ones. They met when he invited her to come and explain why she'd called him "pseudo-scientific" in a critical piece. "We came to like each other extremely and to be extremely exasperated and antagonistic". In the end he called it "the warmest, liveliest and most irreplaceable of fellowships... the world was full of men she couldn't talk to as she talked to me, and of women I had only a brief and simple use for." I bet she took him to task every day for his sexism. But I get the sense too that he was quite a chap, since so many intelligent women took so warmheartedly to him. ps. I'd say he thinks Kindles are great since he foresaw them after all in World Brain.
Modernista43 says:
Erm, I’m just going to try and sneak in a non-HG Wells related question here... is the reason that the cover of the US version of How to Be Both has St Lucy’s eyes image rather than Sylvie Vartan purely to do with copyright, and if so, does it matter?
Guardian contributor Hello Modernista
The US wanted to create their own copy - Canada kept Vartan and Hardy. But I was really happy the US publisher chose a Del Cossa - St Lucy's eyes. Such a striking image.
And that cover now, for those who haven’t seen the US version:
Eric Batt has another question:
Borges said The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, The Time Machine, and The Island of Dr. Moreau were Wells’ best novels. Do you think they are? Borges also said Wells’ books were the first ones he ever read, and might be the last.
Guardian contributor Hi Eric (again)
He also said he thought they outlanguaged language - that they'd transfer through time and last like fables, pass "into the general memory of the species and even transcend" the extinction of English! I find the first books Wells wrote astonishing. Classic after classic, and that was his debut period.
seedysolipsist says:
The book that changed my perception of Wells was Mr Britling. It’s not one of his best known and I’ve no idea why I picked it up. Up til then my image of Wells was formed by reading Kipps as school book plus later some of the science fiction... so Ali, what book changed your view of Wells?
Guardian contributor Hi Seedy (can I call you Seedy?)
The Invisible Man. It's a canny piece of foresight and farce and a perfectly formed untaming of the novel form, steeped in mock realism, asking questions of the real.
Eric Batt says:
I am curious to know if you think HG Wells was just stating the relentless facts as he saw them, or whether he actually, in 1901, embraced ideas like:
It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.
?
I do believe he changed his views completely by the time he wrote his History, but did he in 1901 willingly buy into, support, the dire racial rhetoric of “inferior races” and it’s consequences that the “swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people” “will have to go”? It wasn’t entirely racist since some lower whites (“living machines” I think he called them) would have go too.
[In War of the Worlds] his Martian invasion was not just out of space, it was out of time, since the Martians were really what humans might evolve into in the distant future. “Cold and unsympathetic” intelligence with no qualms about exterminating lesser intelligences. I find it really interesting that Wells, a social thinker with a powerful literary imagination was able in fact to, in my opinion, foreshadow in War of the Worlds the Jewish Holocaust...
PS Do you think his thinking was profoundly effected by the Tasmanian Holocaust?
Guardian contributor Hi Eric
I think War of the Worlds is utterly and brilliantly ironic. Deadpan like Defoe, "a leisurely parody of a human stride", it's totally bleak with it, regardless of its "happy" ending. Wells mentions the Tasmanian genocide for exactly this reason, I think.
CorneliusAgain says:
It’s clear that HG Wells used his (science) fiction to express ideas and comment on his own time. Are there any particular stories or ideas that you think are very relevant today?
Guardian contributor HI Cornelius
One of the reasons for still reading Wells is that like all the great storytellers his stories will always shock us into relevance, future and past. Start anywhere.
'One of the big reasons I like Wells is that he knows his own contemporaneous culpability'
Commenter machenbach started a very interesting thread, which initially began in our HG Wells Reading Group discussion:
The Reading Group has been getting in a bit of a tangle attempting to reconcile Wells’s ‘progressive’ political ideas and support for Human Rights with some of his more (to us) unsavoury (anti-Semitic, eugenicist) attitudes. A common defence of this is that he was merely uncritically reflecting some of the common beliefs and biases of his time. But, if that is the case, is the universalism implicit in the notion of ‘Human Rights’ actually merely culturally and historically relative? If so, can we have it both ways – asserting a universal humanity, which has rights, whilst also recognising the historically-particular grounding of this assertion?
Guardian contributor Hi Machenbach
VV interesting thread. I think one of the big reasons I like Wells is that he knows his own contemporaneous culpability and relativity - and in his lifetime he matured enough to change his mind, he wasn't afraid to, he lived and learned. His friend Joseph Conrad took him to task about his early eugenicist rhetoric, which probably came from working with T Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog" as his teacher as a young man. He revised himself. I like that. We're all at the mercy of the blindspots we don't know we've got. And faced with the mass movement of people across the world in the 1940s he didn't erect barriers or walls or fences, he worked on building what became a structure of human rights for all. "We all compromise. We all fall short." He lived a long life.
Updated
'The very early pages of Tono Bungay make me think of Brexit.'
Hanne Mørch says:
You have called Wells “far-seeing”, in what way would you say his ideas can speak to a contemporary audience? And what in particular about his writing style draws you in, being yourself an author who is passionate not just about stories but about style too?
Guardian contributor Hello Hanne
What I like about Wells is how his style is deceptively casual while doing a great deal of work. His farseeing is still seeing - World Brain, written in the 30s, conjures the internet, and I recognise in the social vision of the very early pages of Tono Bungay rumbles that make me think of Brexit.
Updated
nonplussed1 asks:
I have only read HG Wells’s books like The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, so what would be a good non sci-fi book of his to read? Please don’t say The History of Mr Polly ;)
Guardian contributor Hello Nonplussed
How about Ann Veronica? It's cheeky and funny and completely outraging - rather like HGW must have been.
John Crace wrote a digested version for us a few years ago:
Updated
MGFMSKM says:
I’m a huge fan of your work, but have never actually read anything by H. G. Wells - are there any particular novels or stories of his that you feel have particularly impacted your own writing and, if so, how would you describe this?
P.S. I would also like to thank you for producing the work that you have. Last year I went through a really rough patch - pretty much a near-total breakdown of my mental health. Reading some of your short stories (particularly in Public Library) were a surprisingly large part of my getting through it. I find your fiction so brilliant, and moving, and wonderful, and I just want you to know how much it has touched me over the past couple years. :)
Guardian contributor Dear MGF...
I am sending you my warmest wishes and good vibes. I am going to suggest The Invisible Man. It's limber and clever about the visibilities and invisibilities in life and the powers of both. "Nothing can pull our minds together as powerfully as books." (HGW) Big love to you.
judgeDAmNationAgain starts us off with a question about influence:
Hi Ali, it was said somewhere (possibly in one of the last Reading Group posts) that Wells wrote Tono-Bungay under the influence of Dickens - as a fan of Wells, have any of your own books been noticeably influenced/inspired by Wells, or a particular work of his?
Guardian contributor HI Judge
The Wells novel I read when I was 16/17 was History of Mr Polly - Without me realising, it made a big impression on me. I reread it last year and realised how much I remembered near verbatim. From its first page it debates what language is, what a word is, what voice is, who owns voice, speech, lives - and its push for liberation from given life patterns went deep for me at such a formative time.
Updated
And we're live!
Hello to Ali Smith, who is with us in Guardian HQ to answer your questions.
Guardian contributor Hello everyone. "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." That's HG Wells.
Post your questions for author and HG Wells fan, Ali Smith!
I’m pleased to announce that Ali Smith will be here for a live online Q&A about HG Wells and other things on Tuesday 27 September at 1pm.
In 2015, Ali Smith delivered the second-annual PEN HG Wells lecture, dedicated to the writer, correctly identifying him as “far-seeing” and “exceptionally powerful and exceptionally thoughtful about the workings of power”.
In that speech Smith showed considerable knowledge and feeling for Wells’ life and works – but I should warn you that she claims to be more of a fan of the writer than an expert on his life and novels. It’s probably best to ask for her impressions of the great man than for encyclopedic or obscure remarks. But that’s all to our benefit, because we can stretch out into one of Wells’ favourite realms – that of ideas – rather than get stuck on minutiae. It’s also an incentive to make the most of this opportunity to discuss Smith’s own work.
Like Wells, Smith is a human rights campaigner of force and eloquence and a novelist of considerable talent. Her last book, How to Be Both, won a remarkable treble of prizes in 2014 and 2015, scooping up the Goldsmiths prize, the Costa prize and the Baileys, and was shortlisted for the Booker and the Folio prizes. She has also written five other critically acclaimed novels and five short story collections. Her new novel, Autumn, will arrive in October. It’s a fine body of work, and we are lucky and honoured to be able to talk to her about it, as well as about the brilliant HG Wells.
Smith will be here from 1pm on Tuesday, so post your questions now.
To help get the ball rolling, I’m happy to say that we have five copies of The Rights of Man by HG Wells, with an introduction by Ali Smith to give away to the first five readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive question, in the comments section below.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
"For the restoration and modernisation of human civilisation, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights." HG Wells, The Rights of Man. Last word to HG. Thank you everybody.