Abstract. The following is a review of Van Wyck Brooks’s The world of H. G. Wells (1915) (New York, NY: Mitchell Kennerly), which constitutes a tour de force through Wells’s vast corpus of writings, both fictional and non-fictional. Brooks’s main thesis is that Wells’s worldview is based on the idea that human beings and living beings in general are “episodical in the great synthesis of life” (First and last things; Wells 1908). In Wells’s system, there are two crucial keys to the enigmas of the Universe: 1) the idea that life itself must be understood as a “myriad-minded organism”; and 2) the idea that all of reality put together would be sheer nonsense if all living beings in it did not have truly free wills. In Wells’s view, the fact that free will is a true reality is demonstrated by the “infinite plasticity of things” (Brooks 1915) inside a Universe that contains at the same time an infinite number of determinisms. Living beings are thus proclaimed to be free to forge their own destinies, and that is one of the reasons why Wells forged an imaginary fictional Universe where even time travel can happen by a combination of science, technology & magic.

Key words: proto-SF; magic shop; baloon perspective; plasticity; becoming; time travel; future

Stroe MA (2025) The universe of proto-science fiction: Van Wick Brooks on H. G. Wells. Creativity 8(2): 553–571. doi:10.22381/C8220255