Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter explores the complex and dynamic relation between H. G. Wells and literary modernism. Rejecting the received story of Wells as a traditionalist whose work contrasts with modernism’s experimentalism, the chapter argues instead that Wells and modernism offer interlocked and mutually generative ways of writing the modern world. Taking as touchpoints three broad topics—science and evolution; past and future; and precarious humanity—it suggests that reading Wells and his more canonical literary peers side by side enriches our understanding of this period and widens our sense of its accomplishments. Wells was one of the most far-reaching and widely read thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, and to reckon with his extraordinary body of writing alongside the work of modernists is to shed a new light not just on Wells’s work, or on modernism and its own preoccupations, but on the nature of the human experience itself.</jats:p>