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  • Published: 1 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780812970753
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $45.00

Selected Stories of H. G. Wells





Unique Features: Edited and introduced by Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s selection of twenty-six stories showcases H. G. Wells’s 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 Davidson’s 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 Brownlow’s Newspaper”
“The Country of the Blind”

  • Published: 1 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780812970753
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $45.00

About the author

H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years' apprenticeship in a draper's shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.

Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women's rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'.

Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.

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