Wells made his first hit with "The Time Machine", written under high pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. It is based upon the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space,[7] and by a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that line. Having once got his seat in his time-machine Wells has never abandoned it. He uses it still in his novels, in "Tono-Bungay," "The New Machiavelli", and "The Passionate Friends", telling the story partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the perpetual contemporaneity of existence, though some readers are dizzied by it.

The charm of a masked ball is that it enables people to do and say what they please, in short to reveal themselves because their faces are concealed. Anonymity has the same effect, as many a name from "Currer Bell" to "Fiona McLeod" attests. So it is not surprising that the book[8] which purports to have been written by one "George Boon" and compiled by one "Reginald Bliss" shows Wellsian characteristics more pronounced than any of the volumes of which H. G. Wells owns authorship.

For one thing Wells obviously likes to start things better than to finish them. He is apt to run out of breath before he comes to the end of a novel, and if he gets his second wind it is likely to be some other kind of wind. In most of his books except the short stories the reader feels that the author is saying to himself, "I wish I had this thing off my hands so I could get at that new idea of mine."

Then, too, Wells is fond of putting a story inside of a story, like the Arabian Nights, and it often happens that the "flash-backs", to borrow a cinema phrase, are confusing. The framework of "The Modern Utopia" is an instance of this. It is sometimes hard to tell in this where we are or who is speaking.

Wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. He delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. His mind is quick to change. He is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden vision of an opposing view. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost confidence. He may double on his track like a hunted fox within the compass of a single volume.

Finally, Wells is fond of satirizing his contemporaries, including his best friends and his former selves. He is given to mixing realistic description with recondite symbolism, desultory argumentation with extraneous personalities, and other incongruous combinations of style and thought.

Now all these peculiarities, call them faults or merits as you like, are to be found intensified in "Boon" Etc. First Mr. Wells introduces Mr. Bliss, who then introduces Mr. Boon, a famous author deceased, and tells how they together invented Mr. Hallery, who introduces a host of living writers, big and little, known and unknown, at the World Conference on the Mind of the Race. He has given me the honor of a seat on a special committee of Section S, devoted to Poiometry, the scientific measurement of literary greatness.

The volume is illustrated by the author—whoever he may be—but the best caricatures are not the graphic but the verbal ones with their amusing parodies of style. Perhaps the best of these is an imaginary conversation between Henry James and George Moore, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Here's the sketch of "Dodd." We recognize him, although we do not know who Dodd is: