Michael Foot believes his friend, the writer HG Wells, is about to receive a much-deserved revival, he tells Dan Carrier

“Flashes of flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned into fire.”
HG Wells’s penned these lines in his seminal alien invasion book The War of the Worlds in 1898. Using alien technology – which would destroy anybody, and anything, standing in its way – the invaders lay waste to the world before them.
And now Wells’s biographer and friend, the former Labour leader and Hampstead resident Michael Foot, says with a technological war being waged in Iraq, it is time for a revival of the man who is credited with inventing Science Fiction.
“He was a prophet,” says Foot, from his home in Pilgrim’s Lane.
“This was five years before the Wright brothers had flown – yet he envisaged death from the air. I can only hope the recently released film of the book will be watched in a way that Wells wanted his book to be read.”
Along with Steven Speilberg’s film, all of Wells’s books are also being re-released this month, with Foot, Margaret Drabble and David Lodge among others providing introductions to accompany the texts. This is a Wellsian year, remarks Foot. “There is a H G revival underway – and not before time,” he concludes. “His work is as relevant today as it was when it was first written.”
The 1938 radio version, by Orson Welles, caused panic across America when the listeners did not realise the show was fiction: but H G Wells, who lived in Camden and Hampstead, used his fiction to talk about facts, and Foot believes the parallels between what Wells was trying to say at the turn of the century and today are uncanny.
“He was bitterly opposed to the British Empire. He thought it was a real disgrace,” says Foot, who celebrated his 93rd birthday two weeks ago.
“And that was really what the War of the Worlds was about: it wasn’t just a great adventure story, it was about invasion: he would have seen a terrible irony in the fact Hollywood, this year, decided to make a film of his book while America and Britain are fighting in Iraq.”
Foot believes a new generation of fans are being won. He just hopes Wells’s sense of social justice is not airbrushed out by the film makers.
Foot adds: “He would be horrified – horrified by the film being made now, even though he loved seeing his books reach the screen, because he would have been horrified by the behaviour of the US and British governments today. He would have hoped lessons had been learnt.”
In War of the Worlds, the Martians – who are finally defeated on the slopes of Primrose Hill – come to earth because of a scarcity of resources on their own planet – again, a situation that has resonates with Foot when he looks at Wellsian thought and the Anglo-American invasion of one of the world’s biggest oil producers.
“War in Iraq has been the worst aspect of this government,” he says.
“The United Nations could have provided an alternative. How can unilateral attacks in this manner be justified?”
Foot is better placed than most to consider what Wells, who lived in Church Row, Hampstead, would have thought of the current war.
As well as being friends, Foot, a former leader of the Labour Party, attributes his life of working for socialist causes to the influence of Wells.
He says: “The early 20th century was an age of great novelists. Wells was among the foremost of the many. It was also the age of great journalists, especially those espousing the newly developing radical or socialist causes. I was deeply influenced by this as a young man.”
Foot was searching for a new job when he met Wells: “I was invited to Lord Beaverbrook’s country house for a weekend party,” he recalls.
“I walked in and there was Wells – the hero of my youth.”
Foot could now admire him from close up instead of afar.
“To see him holding court, in the flesh, was a memorable experience.”
He recalls how, aged 21, he went on a trip to see the delights of Paris with his brother John. But the nightclubs and art galleries played second fiddle to Wells’s book Tono-Bungay, a social satire about a scientist who invents a bogus medicine and makes a fortune from it. The two brothers packed the book for the journey and proceeded to fight over it.
“We had to ration ourselves to just 30 pages a day. It is a masterpiece,” says Foot.
George Orwell had a similar experience. Writing to his friend Cyril Connolly of their time together at St Crypians, boarding school, he said: “I remember sneaking into your dormitory at 4am to steal Wells’s books from off your bedside table – and you doing the same to me.”
But Orwell criticised Wells – they met and argued, and in his essay The Rediscovery of Europe, Orwell wrote he “looked at the past with some sort of surprised disgust as a civilised man contemplating a tribe of cannibals”.
He continued by saying Wells was “too sane” to understand the modern world, and that his unshakeable belief that science and rational thought would end up improving life was flawed. But Foot admires Wells’s attitude towards science, and says his political, moral and scientific philosophy had a massive influence on his own development.
“I cannot underestimate his work: I was so excited by it,” he says. “He is perhaps the greatest democratic Socialist writer.”
As well as writing fiction that was used as a base to attack imperialism, he also foresaw the problems the technological age would bring: he knew it wasn’t just aliens who would develop ‘death rays’ and attack civilians from above. From the slaughter on the Western Front, through to Guernica, Hiroshima, napalm in Vietnam – Wells could envisage such tragedies, argues Foot.
He says: “He was the first person to write about weapons of mass destruction – and he was the first to call for international controls .”
This is why the recent film, and the re-launching of all the books he wrote, delights Foot – even if he is unsure whether people watching the film or reading the stories will understand the political point Wells was making.
He said of Wells attitude towards Britain’s days of imperial conquest: “We had such a great liberal tradition but instead of spreading that, he felt we were oppressors, feeding off others. In the War of the Worlds, that really comes out, but his critics – and upholders of the status quo-tried to cut this out.”
As with Wells’ great hero Jonathan Swift, his books were presented by many as being nothing more than children’s tales. They refused to acknowledge the fact both writers were using stories as allegories on a political question.
“Another great anti-war piece is Gullivers Travels - It’s a furious attack on those who wage war,” considers Foot.
“Wells would have thought our behaviour was as bad. He would have opposed the war in Iraq and Afghanistan: he would have hated the way they were attacked.”
And Foot says the creation of War of the Worlds by American studios as solely an action story, ignoring the parable behind it, would have left an unpleasant taste in his mouth.
“He was hopeful for America,” recalls Foot.
“His America was the America of Thomas Jefferson. The America of today would have been a great disappointment to him.”