A man spontaneously has his visual perception relocated to a site on the opposite side of the planet, but none of his other senses are affected.
An object from deep space crashes into Neptune, ignites into a small star, and plunges through the inner solar system on its way to the Sun, causing global disasters and devastation.
What's on display here is a sort of a cross-section of the range of fiction writing that Wells produced, showing just how far beyond his well-known science fiction works he actually went. The stories aren't designed to have a lengthy or high-stakes plot, for the most part; the general construction of most seems to be that Wells came up with an idea that seemed impossible, then went through the thought of how to make that seem reasonable, and explores it and the ramifications.
A successful politician is haunted by a magical door that he passed through once as a young boy, then passes by every time he encountered it again, despite a desire to return to the mysterious garden beyond the portal.
The most stunning thing about this collection may be the specific variety selected. We get examples of what seems to be almost pre-figuring many later sub-genres within science fiction, showing just how much the genre as a whole owes to him. While space travel and the parts of sci-fi that are associated with that are quite outside of what's on display here (the two stories featuring Martians in any context leave them quite contentedly on Mars), we get stories that work with hard science, stories that attempt to prefigure future technology, stories that imagine a culture and investigate how it might interact with others.
A man under the influence of anaesthesia for a surgical procedure, convinced he is going to die while under the knife, experiences Cosmic Zoom.
It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well. Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was. The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.
A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.
None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends. In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.
It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well. Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was. The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.
A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.
None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends. In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.
A trip up the Amazon River leads to the verified discovery of a species of oversized, intensely venomous ants with abnormally high intelligence, which are engaging in an actively genocidal invasion of human settlements within the rainforest, and seem to be on the verge of successfully figuring out boats.
This collection honestly has a bit of everything in it. There are several stories that seem to prefigure themes that H.P. Lovecraft would eventually deal with, alongside rather chilling, entirely-mundane-in-setting crime fiction. There are visions of the future on display, but the longest story is about a particularly clever Neanderthal in the stone age. For the most part, Wells always writes with a certain academic voice to his writing, which establishes The story that concludes the book is a rather humorous little tale of an author crossing paths with a devil who was cast out of Hell for abandoning his post at the wrong time, and has no science-fiction content to it at all, but all the same, it's a delightful yarn. And that's really what one has to look for in a collection like this; a wide range of topics and genres, ending on a somewhat silly note, seems just the way to allow readers to discover how much more than 'just' a science-fiction writer H.G. Wells actually was.
Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.
Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.
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