From the Archive • Featured Reading

Richard Matheson • 1956

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Relinquishing to Moral Capital

Wells made a man invisible and watched him become a monster. Matheson shrank a man to the subatomic and found him still capable of wonder. Both used physical impossibility to ask what remains of a human being when everything external is stripped away — and arrived at incompatible answers.

Wells’s answer was appetite. Matheson’s answer was to God there is no zero — the vision Wells’s materialism made structurally impossible: a universe in which smallness cannot extinguish worth, in which the image of God persists below the threshold of measurement.

Outside the Bible, no single writer has covered a wider spectrum of human thought and left a deeper mark on the world that followed. The Wellsian Universe is this site’s dedicated space for everything pertaining to H.G. Wells — his theology, his influence, and the 130-year argument he started.