Two things learned from a mediocre HG Wells biography.

From H.G. Wells by Brian Murray
New York: Continuum, 1990.

1.) I actually found the letter Joseph Conrad wrote in which he calls Wells the "realist of the fantastic" (other sources had previously only mentioned the letter).  Conrad, in response to reading The War of the Worlds, writes,
"I suppose you'll have the common decency to believe me when I tell you I am always powerfully impressed by your work.  Impressed is THE word, O Realist of the Fantastic! whether you like it or not.  And if you want to know what impresses me it is to see how you contrive to give over humanity to the clutches of the Impossible and yet manage to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly.  THAT is the achievement.  In this little book you do it with an appalling completeness." (Murray 39)

Murray cites this as being from Parrinder's H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, p. 60.

2.) Critics of The Time Machine criticized the novel for its holes in logic.  Mostly trying to disprove time travel as a possibility, as if Wells were presenting a real scientific theory rather than offering a mere fictional adventure.

"The book impressed several reviewers with the power of its descriptions and the vitality of its prose; but one, Israel Zangwill, himself a novelist, pointed out that the tale does present lapses in logic that some readers have always found hard to ignore.  As Zangwill observes, it never occurs to Wells's "Time Traveller" that he will have to repeat "these painful experiences of his, else his vision of the future will have falsified itself - though how the long dispersed dust is to be vivified again does not appear."  Moreover, writes Zangwill, had the Time Traveller "travelled backwards, he would have reproduced a Past which, insofar as his own appearance in it with his newly invented machine was concerned, would have been ex hypothesi unveracious."  For of course had he "recurred to his own earlier life, he would have had to exist in two forms simultaneously, of varying ages."  These "absurdities," writes Zangwill, "illustrate the absurdity of any attempt to grapple with the notion of Time"' they prove too that "there is no getting into the Future, except by waiting." (Murray 37)