Wells, Robert

UK author who began publishing sf with “The Machine That Was Lonely” in the Observer in 1954, one of that newspaper’s prize competition stories assembled as A.D. 2500: The Observer Prize Stories (anth 1954) edited anonymously. Wells later concentrated on novels, beginning with The Parasaurians (1969), in which fake safaris against Robot Dinosaurs turn into a more serious threat to the hero – an early appearance in the SF Megatext of a pattern of story central to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park sequence from 1990 on. Candle in the Sun (1971) explores a Last Man scenario through the plight of a man left alone in a deep-ocean station (see Under the Sea) with reason to believe life has ended above, though he soon meets a culture of aquatic Mutants. In the first volume of the Shroud sequence, Right-Handed Wilderness (1973), a Biological threat to the human species surfaces suddenly, though the two Telepathic protagonists are able to cope; they return in The Spacejacks (1975), a conspiracy-drenched Space Opera involving the eponymous ship salvagers and Alien Invasion and super-advanced science.