Selected Short Stories

Selected Short Stories gathers twenty-one examples of H. G. Wells looking at the modern world, raising one scientific eyebrow and asking what would happen if everything went horribly wrong by Thursday.

Wells is remembered chiefly for Martians, time machines and invisible men, but his shorter fiction reveals just how many other ways he found to disturb the respectable Victorian household. Strange organisms bloom, scientific experiments develop unforeseen administrative difficulties, ordinary men stumble into impossible worlds and humanity repeatedly discovers that it may not be the cleverest species in the room. Wells had enormous faith in scientific enquiry, provided nobody confused this with faith in the scientists conducting it.

These stories range across science fiction, fantasy, horror, comedy and social satire. Some open quietly in laboratories, drawing rooms or suburban streets before reality begins loosening around the edges. Others launch directly into visions of strange futures, altered bodies, cosmic catastrophes and inventions whose creators have neglected the traditional final stage of research: wondering whether the thing ought to exist at all.

Wells possessed the unsettling ability to make the impossible sound like a report from a particularly observant local newspaper. His monsters and marvels arrive not in vague enchanted kingdoms but amid railway timetables, scientific societies, rented rooms and middle-class conversations. A man may be transported into another dimension, glimpse an alien world or acquire miraculous powers, but somebody will still ask whether he has a respectable occupation.

Beneath the ingenious plots is Wells’s persistent suspicion that civilisation is rather less secure than it looks. Humanity considers itself rational, progressive and firmly in charge, yet is generally one unusual orchid, astronomical event or improperly supervised experiment away from complete panic. His characters represent the confident modern age at its best: clever enough to open the forbidden door and surprised when something comes through it.

There is wit as well as unease. Wells delights in pompous experts, complacent gentlemen, ambitious inventors and the wonderfully British instinct to react to supernatural catastrophe with mild embarrassment. The stories can be eerie, savage, melancholy or absurd, sometimes within the same few pages. They also demonstrate how much later science fiction owes him; countless subsequent writers have spent their careers exploring conceptual furniture that Wells had already assembled, tested and occasionally set on fire.

This substantial Penguin collection offers an excellent route beyond the famous novels and into Wells’s laboratory of smaller inventions. Each story is compact enough to be read in one sitting, although readers should remember that “one sitting” in Wells may involve evolutionary nightmares, temporal abnormalities and the sudden extinction of mankind before bedtime.

This copy is in Good condition and is an ex-library book, having survived years of institutional service, official markings and readers returning it three weeks late because they had apparently been trapped in the fourth dimension. The cover hinges have been repaired by Crappy Old Books, restoring structural stability through methods rather less experimental than those employed by Wells’s scientists. The repair is visible evidence of its continued adventures rather than an attempt to pass it off as untouched.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where damaged hinges are repaired, former library books are granted parole and dangerous scientific experiments are discouraged anywhere near the stock. A characterful reading copy containing twenty-one reminders that progress is marvellous right up until it begins eating the researchers.

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