H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells and the Doctor have crossed paths at least once. After meeting the Doctor, he went on to write such works as "The Time Machine", The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Adventures with the Doctor
While vacationing in Scotland in 1885, a young H.G. Wells experimented with magic and believed he had summoned both Vena, who had appeared via the Timelash and the Doctor, whose TARDIS had appeared to follow her.

Though the Doctor found Wells somewhat irritating, he accompanied the Doctor went to the planet Karfel, he helped the Doctor defeat the despotic Borad. Along the way, Wells found inspiration for fiction he would write and publish.


 * A time machine.


 * Aliens and space travel.


 * Invisibility. The Doctor used a kontron crystal to make his visual image lag a few seconds behind his physical body. This could give the impression of invisibility.


 * Morloxes. These helped to inspire the name of Wells' rather different Morlocks, in Wells' "The Time Machine".


 * Hybrid life forms. Specifically the Borad, somewhat like the creations of Wells' fictional Dr. Moreau.

Thanks to the Doctor, Wells also inadvertantly coined the phrase "science fiction". (DW:Timelash.)

The Doctor earlier claimed to have lent Bertie Wells his ion-focusing coil for an invisibility experiment. (MA:The Ghosts of N-Space)


 * This may have happened, from H.G. Wells' point of view, after the adventure on Karfel, seeing that Wells did not recognize the Doctor when they met in 1885.

Other references
The Master sat down to read The War of the Worlds while preparing to provoke a real interstellar war between Humans and Draconians. (DW: Frontier in Space) The Master used the Martian tripods and their heat rays from The War of the Worlds against fictional villains in the Land of Fiction (DWM: Character Assasin)

Similarly, the Doctor sat down to read "The Time Machine" before disaster struck. After his regeneration into a new body and the adventures that ensued, he sat down once again to finish the book. DW: Doctor Who: The TV Movie)

Minor references

 * Disbelieving in time machines, Laurence Scarman compared the Doctor's assertions to the "scientific romances of Mr. Wells" (DW: Pyramids of Mars)


 * Another scoffer made a similar statement. (DW: Black Orchid)


 * Sarah Jane Smith had a copy of a volume of Wells' short stories in her library. (SJA: Invasion of the Bane).

Behind the Scenes
Doctor Who owes an obvious debt to Wells, The idea of a time machine originated in Well's The Time Machine and plot of The Daleks has a lot of similarity to George Pál's movie adaptation of The Time Machine. The Daleks themselves resemble the Martians of The War of the Worlds. So unsurprsingly, a number of affectionate references to H.G. Wells have found their way into the series.

Though Timelash suggests otherwise, H.G. Wells did not, in reality, coin the term science fiction, which first saw use sometime after 1926.