Wells’s earliest works of fiction explore the dramatic possibilities suggested to him by the theories of Lyell, Darwin, and Huxley, both in their consistent foregrounding of the scientific experiment as leitmotif and in terms of their efforts to represent the scales involved in “scientific” reality. Wells’s secular worldview was grounded in the supposition that the conditions of life in the present could be grasped only by recourse to huge expanses of time and space – on scales that vastly exceeded the limits of subjective experience. However, working at these scales posed serious problems for the novel, whose narrative devices traditionally privileged subjective experience, and whose formal conventions, as I will discuss in this chapter, functioned at least in part as strategies for delimiting the potentially infinite horizons of modern life.