The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

G. Wells has had a great impact on history.

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. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps; The History of Mr Polly) leading him to be touted as 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. Wells is one person sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction" as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.