W. Warren Wagar
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W. Warren Wagar (1932 - November 16, 2004) was a historian and futures studies scholar.
A specialist in alternative society futures and an expert in the work of pioneering science fiction writer H.G. Wells, Wagar served as history professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York, for 31 years. His courses on the history of the future and World War III earned him the title of Distinguished Teaching Professor at Binghamton.
Wagar published 18 books, including A Short History of the Future, a narrative account of the imagined events of the next 200 years. In 1984, he began writing science fiction, publishing nine stories in various magazines and anthologies. He wrote four articles for The Futurist, contributed to a discussion on terrorism in the January-February 2002 issue, served on the editorial board for Futures Research Quarterly, and spoke at several World Future Society conferences.
Wagar's work on H. G. Wells began with his doctoral dissertation, which was published as H. G. Wells and the World State (1961), which, along with John S. Partington's Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells, is the most important study of Wells's political philosophy. He subsequently collected a volume of rare but important Wells essays and extracts together in H. G. Wells: Journalism and Pophecy (1963), edited a critical edition of Wells's The Open Conspiracy (2001) and finally published H.G. Wells: Traversing Time, which traces Wells’s philosophies on utopia, war, romance, education, and modernism, focusing on his nonfiction and general fiction as well as his science fiction. For these, and many essays on Wells in such scholarly journals as Science Fiction Studies and The Wellsian, Wagar was made a vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society.
