Stephen Baxter, vice president of the Wells Society and author of The Massacre of Mankind, an official sequel to The War of the Worlds, said he thought Wells would have been “very flattered by the coin, but infuriated by that non-tripod! It’s not just the extra leg but the stiffness of it. I’d say Wells would be annoyed by this carelessness: he took immense pains to get things right in his own work – inviting translators of his book to stay with him to help the process and minimise errors and so on.” “A tripod with four legs is hard to comprehend ( tri: the clue is in the name), and Wells’s (distinctly ungentlemanly) invisible man, Griffin, never wore a top hat.
“It’s nice to see Wells memorialised, but it would have been nicer for them to get things right,” Roberts said. Science fiction novelist and professor of 19th-century literature Adam Roberts, who is author of a biography of Wells and vice president of the HG Wells Society, also criticised the depiction of the Invisible Man, shown in a top hat in the book he arrives at Iping under a “wide-brimmed hat”. “How many people did this have to go through? Did they know how to count?” The man famous for creating the Martian TRIpod,” wrote artist Holly Humphries. “As someone who particularly likes one of his very famous stories, can I just note that the big walking machine on the coin has four legs? Four legs. Unfortunately, it strays from Wells’s vision of his creations.
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