Charles Darwin's 1859 ground-breaking study of humanity's beginnings, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, had a profound impact on Wells's intellectual development.

Like Wells, William Gibson is a science fiction writer. Gibson, however, is interested in the interface between human beings and machines, rather than human beings and animals. His blockbuster novel Neuromancer (1984) helped to establish the genre of Cyberpunk literature.

T. H. Huxley was perhaps the largest single influence on Wells's career as a writer and thinker. Adrian Desmond's biography Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest (1997) examines Huxley's role in popularizing Darwin's theory of evolution and in legitimizing science in nineteenth-century Britain.

Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) is the first novel to explicitly use time travel in its plot.

Wells's novel The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility (1896), about an island stocked with hybrids of animals and human beings from scientific experiments gone bad, remains one of Wells's more popular works and is particularly relevant today.