Steven McLean

Steven McLean is a literary scholar who has spent his career on one writer: H. G. Wells. He is a former Secretary of the H. G. Wells Society and has taught at universities in the United Kingdom and in Asia. He is not a novelist. The Time Machine on WebToTell is Wells's book, and McLean's part is the apparatus around it.

His work is criticism and annotation. He has written articles and encyclopedia entries on Wells, edited the essay collection H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (2009), and has written on Zola and on literature and aeronautics. His central argument is that Wells's early scientific romances are not only the ancestors of modern science fiction. They are also bound up with the scientific and social arguments of the 1890s and 1900s.

That argument fills The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). It opens with a chapter on The Time Machine and retrogression. A review in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens reports that the book was shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science's book of the year for 2010. For Penguin Classics he supplied the notes to the 2005 edition of The Time Machine, and also to The Island of Doctor Moreau, which carries an introduction by Margaret Atwood.

A reader who has just finished The Time Machine can start with the Penguin edition he annotated. His notes explain period references that a modern reader may miss. For more on why the Eloi and Morlocks look the way they do, go next to the first chapter of The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells.