Saturday Show #114: A Moonlight Fable by H.G. Wells (Performance)

Summary: This story is also known as “The Beautiful Suit.” <a href="http://ccmixter.org/files/radiotimes/51571" target="_blank">“He is not afraid” by radiotimes</a>, 2015 – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0). <br> Herbert George “H.G.” Wells is known as the father of science fiction, having written “The Time Machine,” “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” “The Invisible Man,” and “The War of the Worlds.” However, he also wrote some fables. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>, “Wells’s earliest specialized training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels like “Kipps” and “The History of Mr. Polly,” which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion, when they were published, that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in “Tono-Bungay” (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. A diabetic, in 1934 Wells co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK).”<br> While I provide a bit of a bio here as context for the story in the podcast, there is also a school of thought that advocates that the biographical information of the writer should be omitted or ignored when thinking about literary criticism for a specific work. I see both sides of the argument.<br>