In the Days of the Comet

Lore & Background

The novel is framed by a prologue and epilogue written by an unnamed narrator, who meets an old man—the protagonist William Leadford—who recounts his life before and after 'the Change.' The narrative is divided into three books: Book I (The Comet), Book II (The Green Vapours), and Book III (The New World). In Book I, Leadford, a young working-class socialist, quits his job at a pottery works during an economic recession and becomes obsessed with Nettie Stuart, who later jilts him for Edward Verrall, a wealthy heir. Leadford buys a revolver to kill them and himself, but as he prepares to act, a green comet enters the atmosphere and disintegrates, releasing a soporific green fog.

Reader's Guide

In the Days of the Comet is significant as a work of early science fiction that uses a cosmic event to explore themes of social reform, class conflict, and human nature. Wells's depiction of the 'Change'—a sudden, universal shift toward peace, clarity, and fellow-feeling—reflects his socialist ideals and belief in the possibility of radical improvement. However, the novel's ending, in which Leadford, Nettie, Verrall, and Anna form a close polyamorous relationship, caused scandal. Organizations such as the YWCA and the Salvation Army condemned the book, and the Times Literary Supplement criticized it as advocating communal property in wives. Beatrice Webb noted that Wells seemed to be 'gambling with the idea of free love' without responsibility for its effect. The controversy damaged Wells's reputation among the Fabians. The novel remains a notable example of Wells's utopian and didactic fiction, blending scientific speculation with social commentary.

Did You Know?

• The novel's green comet causes the nitrogen of the air to become a respirable gas that heals nerve and brain.
• Leadford's friend Parload, who initially argues that science is 'something more' than socialism, later becomes a great scientist whose work on intersecting radiations broadens human intellect.
• The epilogue reveals that the 72-year-old Leadford, Nettie, Verrall, and Anna were 'very close' as 'friends, helpers, personal lovers in a world of lovers.'
• The book was criticized by the Times Literary Supplement, which suggested that socialists' wives, like their goods, were to be held in common.

Astronomical Roots and the Birth of the Theme

The fascination with celestial bodies striking Earth has deep roots in the nineteenth century, when two shifts in astronomical understanding gave writers fresh material. As David Pringle notes in his science fiction encyclopedia, the recognition that shooting stars were actually objects entering the atmosphere from space, combined with a growing awareness of how many bodies populate the Solar System, opened narrative possibilities that had previously seemed fantastical. Brian Stableford adds another thread: after Maria Mitchell made the first telescopic detection of a comet in 1835, observers began cataloguing comets with instruments rather than the naked eye, revealing that these visitors were far more numerous than anyone had imagined. The earliest fictional treatments naturally centered on comets as the impactors, though asteroids and meteoroids gradually took a larger role throughout the twentieth century. Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 tale, in which a comet's tail strips away part of the atmosphere before the nucleus itself strikes the planet, is often cited as the first attempt at a scientifically grounded impact narrative. Camille Flammarion followed with his 1894 novel, in which scientists debate the various ways a cometary collision could end civilization, only for the event to prove survivable in the end.

The Subgenre and Its Signature Tropes

Dorian Lynskey carves out impact fiction as a recognizable subgenre within the broader apocalyptic tradition, identifying a constellation of recurring elements that set it apart. Chief among these is the figure of the astronomer or scientist whose dire warnings fall on deaf ears, a role Lynskey likens to Cassandra from classical mythology, doomed to speak truth that no one will credit. What unites the subgenre across its many variations is not the specific identity of the impactor, whether comet, asteroid, rogue planet, or even the Moon, but the sheer catastrophic force of the collision itself. Dylan Roth points to the theme's enduring appeal as a matter of narrative economy: an impact requires no villain, no elaborate conspiracy, no slow-burn antagonism. Andrew Sawyer echoes this, noting that the scenario carries no deliberate hostile will behind it, and observes that science fiction largely holds a monopoly on such purely natural disasters. Yet the motif's flexibility is remarkable. A single impact premise can support a tightly wound character drama, a darkly comic satire, or unadulterated visual spectacle, making it one of the most adaptable frameworks in speculative storytelling.

Cultural Waves and Real-World Catalysts

Interest in impact narratives has never been steady; it surges in response to events in the wider world. The 1890s saw a spike as the broader fin de siècle mood made apocalyptic imagery fashionable across European culture. When Halley's Comet swept across the sky in 1910, the theme leapt from page to screen: the Edison Film Company produced a short called The Comet that year, and Denmark's 1916 feature Verdens Undergang became the first full-length film to depict an apocalyptic impact. The post–World War II era brought a more ambiguous influence. The atomic bomb's shadow could be read as either amplifying the appeal of sudden, uncontrollable catastrophe or diminishing it, since audiences now expected humanity's extinction to be self-inflicted rather than cosmic. The late twentieth century delivered two powerful jolts. The 1980 publication of the Alvarez hypothesis, linking a Chicxulub asteroid impact to the dinosaurs' extinction, gave the theme a deep-time scientific pedigree. Then in 1994, Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, an event widely credited with spawning a wave of disaster films and screen portrayals of impact threats in the years that followed.

Societal Ramifications and Narrative Scope

While the physics of a collision provide the spectacle, the heart of most impact stories lies in the human and social consequences that follow. P. Andrew Karam observes that cometary impact narratives have traditionally prioritized societal ramifications over scientific detail, and this tendency extends across the subgenre. Writers explore the collapse of institutions, the scramble to evacuate or prevent the strike, and the long aftermath of survival. The scope of these stories is remarkably elastic: some place the impact in the deep past, others stage a near miss that spares the planet, and still others shift the target to the Moon or the Sun. A darker variant involves the impact being deliberately engineered, whether as a weapon of mass destruction or as a tool for terraforming a new world. By the turn of the millennium, Stableford noted that asteroidal impacts and climate change had become the twin pillars of apocalyptic fiction. Lynskey adds that post-millennium disaster narratives, impact or otherwise, tend to carry a climate-change subtext, much as nuclear anxiety colored science fiction after 1945. The 1908 Tunguska airburst in Siberia, meanwhile, has served as a recurring real-world reference point, grounding fictional catastrophes in a documented historical event.