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resentment, and is free from the paranoia that invades conjectural fiction after him.

H.G. Wells is of another generation, prey to a cataclysmic world-view counterbalanced by a quest for mutations and radical changes. In fact, Wells fought furiously against being the English Verne'. It is insightful to see what both writers had to say about one another. Speaking of Wells, Verne notes:

I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannonball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation Show me this metal. Let him produce it.

This is what Wells on the other hand said of Verne:

These tales have been compared with the work of Jules Verne and there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact, there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery and he made some remarkable forecasts Most of his inventions have come true'. But these stories of mine do not pretend to deal with possible things, they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field.

In other words, Wells distinguishes between Verneian anticipation' of future possibilities, based on extrapolation from contemporary social and technological trends, and the purely hypothetical scientific fantasy'. Although he himself had significantly contributed to the first type of story (as his reputation as a prophet of the tank, the atom bomb and aerial warfare indicates), his major SF belongs to the second category. In his account of these works, Wells contrasts the purely speculative nature of the hypotheses on which they are based with the rigour with which he pursues the consequences of these hypotheses. The initial premise requires of the reader no more than the willing suspension of his/her disbelief; as the narrator of The Time Machine (1895) says to his hearers, Take it as a lie or a prophesy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop'. Though backed up by a display of scientific patter, the premise (whether time-travel, invisibility or teleportation) is comparable to the traditional marvels of magic and fairy-tale. Once the premise is granted, however, its consequences are explored in a spirit of rigorous realism [quote Wells]:

In all this type of story the

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