Patrick Parrinder is a British critic and editor who spent his career at the University of Reading. He studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and retired as Professor of English in 2008. Along the way he was Head of the English department and Dean of his faculty, and he worked as an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, covering literary figures from 1890 to 1920.
Wells is the thread through his work. His short book H. G. Wells appeared in 1970, followed by a collection of contemporary reviews, H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage. In Shadows of the Future he argues that Wells's uneven output is held together by what Wells himself called critical anticipation, the habit of imagining where the present might lead. Parrinder has also written on James Joyce and on science fiction and utopian writing, and he edited Learning from Other Worlds, a volume of essays honouring the theorist Darko Suvin. Nation and Novel, from Oxford University Press in 2006, asks how English fiction from Defoe onward helped shape ideas of Englishness. He later served as general editor of the twelve-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English.
He is President of the H. G. Wells Society. Publisher biographies say Shadows of the Future won the University of California's Eaton Award in 1996. For Penguin Classics he edited several Wells texts, among them The Time Machine and The Invisible Man.
The Invisible Man is the book to open first. Parrinder edited this edition, Christopher Priest introduces it, Andy Sawyer supplies the notes, and the volume adds a further reading list. When the novel has hooked you, try Shadows of the Future. It is short and argues its case clearly, and it shows why Wells still matters to science fiction.
