The H.G. Wells Reader

“Wells almost rivals Swift.” —
Spectator
(U.K.)

“Wells is less a man of letters than a literature.”

—
JORGE LUIS BORGES
, author of
Ficciones, Labyrinths
, and
The Aleph

“Thinking people are in some sense Wells's own creation. . . . The minds of us all, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

—
GEORGE ORWELL
, author of
1984
and
Animal Farm

“I have the highest respect for Wells's imaginative genius.”

—
JULES VERNE
, author of
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon
, and
A Journey to the Center of the Earth

“Still fresh and enjoyable. . . . Wells's scientific romances were not youthful aberrations or escapist fantasies, but works of art with unique relevance for our times. . . . He believed—though not blindly—that men were capable of improvement and might one day build sane and peaceful societies on all the worlds that lay within their reach. We need this faith now, as never before, in the history of our species.”

—
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
, honorary vice president of the H. G. WELLS SOCIETY, and author of
2001: A Space Odyssey

“Wells contrives to give over humanity into the clutches of the Impossible and yet manages to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly.”

—
JOSEPH CONRAD
, author of
Heart of Darkness

Wells's greatest gift was his ability to range widely through this world, inventing characters whose actions mirror the enormous social anxiety and who each represent a class caught in flux. . . . Wells's efforts seem touchingly brave and might serve as a model for those who want to expand, once more, the province of the novel.”

—
ANDREA BARRETT
, National Book Award-winning author of
The Voyage of the Narwhal
and
Ship Fever

“I personally consider the greatest of English living writers to be H. G. Wells.”

—
UPTON SINCLAIR
, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Jungle
and
Mental Radio

“[Wells's novels] achieve a near poetry which makes them part of the popular mythology of their age. . . . The best of his work has a vitality, a verve, an imaginative compulsion unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries.”

—
N. C. NICHOLSON
, author of
H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells from the
Hulton-Deutsch Collection
/CORBIS

A Complete Anthology from
Science Fiction to Social Satire

Edited by John Huntington

First Taylor Trade Publishing edition 2003

This Taylor Trade Publishing paperback edition of
The H. G. Wells Reader
is an original publication. It is published by arrangement with the editor.

Copyright © 2003 by John Huntington

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200

Lanham, Maryland 20706

Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866–1946

The H.G. Wells reader : a complete anthology from science fiction to social satire / edited by John Huntington.—1st Taylor Trade Pub. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-87833-306-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN: 978-0-87833-306-6

1. Science fiction, English. 2. Satire, English. I. Huntington, John, 1940– II. Title.

PR5772 .H865 2003

823'.912—dc21

2003002119

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z.39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Introduction

Chronology

1 “The Stolen Bacillus” (1894)

2 “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” (1894)

3 “Æpornis Island” (1894)

4 from
The Time Machine
(from chapters 4, 14, 15 and the epilogue) (1895)

5 from
The Wheels of Chance
(chapters 28–29) (1895)

6 from
The Island of Doctor Moreau
(from chapters 12 and 16) (1896)

7 from
The Invisible Man
(chapters 5–7) (1897)

8 from
The War of the Worlds
(book 1, chapters 1, 2, 5, 13, and 17; book 2, chapter 8) (1898)

9 from
The First Men in the Moon
(chapter 6 to the end) (1901)

10 from
The Food of the Gods
(from chapters 2 and 3) (1904)

11 “The Country of the Blind” (1904)

12 from
In the Days of the Comet
(book 1; book 2, from chapters 1 and 3; book 3, from chapters 1 and 3, and the epilogue) (1906)

13 from
Tono-Bungay
(book 2, chapter 2; book 4, chapter 3) (1909)

14
The History of Mr. Polly
(1910)

A Note on Sources

Bibliography

For the first half of the twentieth century H. G. Wells was a tremendously popular fiction writer, an influential thinker, and a widely heeded voice of insight and rationality. George Orwell's remark that Wells was
too
sane to be of much help in the dark years of the late 1930s follows his acknowledgment that for young people at the time Wells had been the most important writer in the first twenty years of the century. The comment also implies that it is in relation to Wells that one can calibrate the crises in modern history. Wells's opinions on biology, on the novel, on politics, on sexuality startled and made people rethink their ideas.

As the works included here should amply demonstrate, Wells's fiction renders with complexity, intelligence, and flair crucial modern situations. At the most obvious, he engages increasingly serious issues of technology and the possibilities of the future. He is an important Darwinian. He may be the greatest English utopianist. He has few rivals as a comic writer. Finally—though this is a quality that is seldom acknowledged as a virtue—he brings to the level of art the experience and understanding of the lower classes. Only Dickens is his match in this respect. Put these virtues together and you have an art full of the richness we associate with the great realist novels, enlivened by an ironic intelligence of the first order, and engaged on important subjects even when most fanciful.

♦

Wells lived an extraordinarily full life whose early parts are especially important for an understanding of his angle of vision and as a measure of his accomplishment. By all rights, given his class origins, his parents' vision, and his upbringing, he should have frittered his life away as a clerk who might rise to middle-level manager. He is, in a very special sense, a “self-made man,” not in the usual American sense of amassing a fortune for himself (though he did that, too), but in the sense that through intelligence and will he fashioned a poor, small, sickly boy into a figure of worldwide intellectual influence.

Sarah Wells's dream was to establish her son's secure future by apprenticing him as a draper's assistant in a department store. Sarah herself was the head domestic servant at Up Park, a large country house which, though it offered the young Wells a good library, also, especially with its tunnel from the kitchen to the main house, came to symbolize for him oppression and inefficiency. Sarah Wells soon got H. G. a place in an emporium, and when he was dismissed after a brief tenure she pulled all the
strings at her disposal to get him another place. This one he endured for two years. He finally insisted against both his parents' wishes that he be allowed to go to school, and an arrangement was established with Horace Byatt, who ran a school for boys, that Wells, a very bright boy, could attend as an assistant teacher. Byatt and he developed a scheme whereby Wells would teach himself a subject by cramming from textbooks, then take a national exam on the subject, and by doing exceptionally well earn scholarship money for the school. Both parties benefited: Byatt financially, and Wells by obtaining an education, and even more, by teaching himself that he could get along by using his mind.

♦

This period of intellectual scramble paid off when Wells earned a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, the technical college recently established as the model for a new kind of scientific education by T. H. Huxley, from the beginning the greatest defender of Darwin's theory of evolution. During his first year Wells studied biology under Huxley himself, and much later in his
Experiment in Autobiography
he would call it “the most educational year of my life.” The next two years were less exciting, and Wells's academic work declined—in part due to poorer teachers (Huxley would be a hard act to follow), and in part due to an understandable burnout. Wells managed to get a degree, but he left the college doubting that he wanted a career in science. For the next few years he made a living tutoring medical students in biology, and his very first book was a textbook on the subject.

Biology was not Wells's only interest during this period, however. He also began writing imaginative fiction for the college literary magazine, and the very first beginning draft of
The Time Machine
was published in
The Science Schools Journal
in 1888 as “The Chronic Argonauts.” He also fell in love with his cousin, Isabel, and in 1891 he married her and set up a house in which they lived with her mother. In 1894, after an affair with a former student, Amy Catherine Robbins, Wells divorced Isabel and married Miss Robbins, whom he always called “Jane.” The marriage lasted until Jane's death in 1928, and, despite Wells's fame and his promiscuity, she maintained a comfortable and stable household on which he much depended.