Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Ursula K. Le Guins selection of twenty-six stories showcases H. G. Wellss genius and reintroduces readers to his singular talent for making the unbelievable seem utterly plausible.

He envisioned a sky filled with airplanes before Orville Wright ever left the ground. He described the spectacle of space travel decades before men set foot on the moon. H. G. Wells was a visionary, a man of science with an enduring literary touch, and his originality and inventiveness are fully on display in this essential collection.

Wells imagined both dark and bright futures because his creed allowed both while promising neither, and because the eighty years of his life were years of immense intellectual and technological accomplishment and appalling violence and destruction.Ursula K. Le Guin, from the introduction

Everything one imagines in the way of genius and fun.Rebecca West

Including these stories:

A Slip Under the Microscope
The Remarkable Case of Davidsons Eyes
The Plattner Story
Under the Knife
The Crystal Egg
The New Accelerator
The Stolen Body
The Argonauts of the Air
In the Abyss
The Star
The Land Ironclads
A Dream of Armageddon
The Lord of the Dynamos
The Valley of Spiders
The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
The Magic Shop
Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland
The Door in the Wall
The Presence by the Fire
A Vision of Judgment
The Story of the Last Trump
The Wild Asses of the Devil
Answer to Prayer
The Queer Story of Brownlows Newspaper
The Country of the Blind

Reviews

Everything one imagines in the way of genius and fun.Rebecca West

Author Bio

H. G. Wells was born Herbert George in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometimes shopkeeper, his mother a former lady's maid. Although "Bertie" left school at fourteen to become a draper's apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher's salary. His other "scientific romances"The Island of Dr. Moreau(1896),The Invisible Man(1897),The War of the Worlds(1898),The First Men in the Moon(1901), andThe War in the Air(1908)won him the distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestsellingOutline of History(1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me."

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929. She is the bestselling author of the Earthsea Cycle and the Hainish Cycle, includingThe Left Hand of Darkness. With the awarding of the 1975 Hugo and Nebula Awards to The Dispossessed, she became the first author to win both awards twice for novels. LeGuin lives in Portland, Oregon.