Introduction

There is a particular kind of writer who arrives at the threshold of a new century and seems to absorb its anxieties, its hopes, and its half-formed nightmares all at once. Herbert George Wells was such a writer. When these stories first reached readers at the turn of the twentieth century, the world was tilting on its axis. Electricity was rewiring the night. Steam was giving way to combustion. Telegraph wires stitched continents together, and the first flickering experiments in heavier-than-air flight promised that the sky itself would soon belong to humankind. Into this churning moment stepped a man who had grown up poor in a Kentish town, who had clawed his way out of an apprenticeship behind a draper’s counter and into the laboratories of the Normal School of Science, where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, the great defender of Darwin. Wells emerged from that education with a mind trained to see human beings not as the fixed and finished crown of creation, but as one species among many, subject to the same laws of change, adaptation, and possible extinction as the trilobite and the dodo. That perspective—humbling, vertiginous, occasionally terrifying—runs like an electric current through every story collected here.

This volume gathers some of the finest short fiction Wells ever produced, presented in a modern translation adapted for the contemporary reader. A word about what that means, because it matters to the experience that lies ahead. Wells wrote in a prose that was, for its time, remarkably clear and direct—he prided himself on plain speaking and disliked ornament for its own sake. Yet more than a century has passed, and language drifts the way coastlines do, slowly but unmistakably. Certain turns of phrase that were transparent to an Edwardian reader now require a small mental translation; certain rhythms of sentence and idiom that once felt brisk now feel slightly formal; certain references to the technology, geography, and social assumptions of 1900 have grown opaque. The adaptation you hold smooths these obstacles without sanding away the texture that makes Wells Wells. The aim has been to let you fall into these worlds as cleanly and completely as his first readers did, to feel the chill of the abyss and the warmth of the lamplight without the friction of an unfamiliar dialect. What remains is the essential Wells: his curiosity, his moral seriousness, his sly humor, and above all his extraordinary gift for taking a single fantastic premise and following it, with ruthless logic, all the way to its human consequences.

It is difficult, from where we stand now, to grasp how much of the furniture of modern imagination Wells built himself. We swim in a sea of ideas that he, more than almost anyone, poured into the cultural reservoir. The time machine, the invisible man, the invading aliens, the engineered creatures, the world transformed by a single new substance or discovery—these are now the common stock of countless novels, films, and television series, repeated so often that they can seem like ancient archetypes. They are not. Many of them have a date and an author, and that author is frequently Wells. When you read these stories, you are drinking from the source rather than the tributary, and there is a particular pleasure in encountering ideas in their first, freshest form, before a thousand imitators wore the edges smooth.

But to call Wells merely an inventor of plots would be to misunderstand him entirely. He was never interested in gadgets for their own sake. What fascinated him was the collision between the new thing—whatever it might be—and the unchanging substance of human nature. Give a man invisibility, and what does he become? Not a superhero, in Wells’s hands, but a creature gradually unmade by his own power, isolated and brutalized by the very gift that should have liberated him. Drop a window of strange transparency into the heart of a quiet domestic scene, and watch how ordinary jealousy and curiosity warp into something far darker. Wells understood, with a clarity that still startles, that technology does not change human beings so much as reveal them. It strips away the social padding and shows us what we are underneath. This is why his stories endure while so much science fiction of subsequent generations has dated badly. The spaceship may be obsolete, but the human heart inside it is not.

His scientific training gave his fantasies a peculiar weight. When Wells describes an impossible event, he describes it the way a careful observer would—noting the temperature, the smell, the precise behavior of light, the small physical details that a less disciplined imagination would skip over. This grounding in observed reality is the secret of his persuasiveness. We believe in the marvels because the world around them feels so solid. A man who can render the texture of a damp English hedgerow or the precise quality of fear in a darkened room with such fidelity has earned our trust when he asks us to believe in something stranger. Wells learned this technique partly from journalism and partly from the laboratory bench, where you do not get to wave your hands; you measure, you record, you account for what you see. He brought that same accountability to the imagination, and the result was a new kind of storytelling that felt less like a fairy tale and more like a dispatch from a possible future.

The title piece of this collection stands among the supreme achievements of the short story form, in any genre or none. Without spoiling the particulars of its design, it can be said that it grows from one of the oldest of proverbs—the notion that in a certain kind of community, the man with a single advantage might be expected to reign supreme. Wells takes that comfortable assumption and turns it slowly, patiently, into something that questions everything we believe about perception, about authority, about what it means to be normal and what it means to be other. It is a story about a traveler who finds himself among people who do not share his most basic way of experiencing the world, and it asks, with disturbing seriousness, who exactly is qualified to say which way of seeing is the right one. The story has been read as a parable of colonialism, of disability, of scientific arrogance, of the loneliness of the outsider, and of the tyranny of consensus. It is all of these and none of them exclusively, which is precisely why it has refused to settle into a single meaning across the decades. Read it slowly. Let its quiet horror accumulate. It rewards patience as few stories do, and its final movement contains one of the most morally complex choices in all of literature—a choice you will find yourself turning over long after you have closed the book.

The remaining stories range across the full spectrum of Wells’s imaginative interests, and their variety is one of the chief delights of this collection. Some are tales of pure scientific marvel, in which a discovery or an experiment opens a door onto wonder or terror. Others are ghost stories, or near-ghost stories, in which Wells turns his rationalist eye on the supernatural and finds it both more and less frightening than superstition would have it. Several are studies in psychology, exploring obsession, fear, ambition, and the strange ways the mind defends itself against truths it cannot bear. A few are almost comic, displaying a lightness of touch that surprises readers who know Wells only by his grimmer reputation. And running beneath nearly all of them is that characteristic Wellsian undertow—the sense that the universe is vaster, stranger, and more indifferent to human concerns than we like to admit, and that our security is a thin and provisional thing, easily disturbed.

What unites these diverse pieces is a quality of vision that the subtitle of this volume names precisely: perception, power, and possibility. Again and again, Wells returns to the question of how we know what we know. His characters are forever encountering evidence that contradicts their settled assumptions, and the drama of the stories often lies in how they respond—whether they expand their understanding to accommodate the new reality, or retreat into denial, or are simply destroyed by what they cannot comprehend. This is the deep theme of the title story, but it surfaces everywhere. Wells was endlessly preoccupied with the limits of the human sensorium and the human mind, with the vast realms of experience that lie just beyond the reach of our senses and our concepts. He had a Darwinian’s awareness that our perceptions evolved not to reveal the truth of the cosmos but merely to keep us alive long enough to reproduce, and that there is no guarantee that the world as we experience it bears much resemblance to the world as it is. This is heady, almost philosophical territory, and yet Wells never lets the ideas float free of flesh and feeling. They are always embodied in a particular person, in a particular predicament, sweating and fearful and alive.

We tend to assume that the anxieties of our age are unprecedented, that no previous generation faced anything quite like the dizzying pace of technological change, the looming environmental catastrophes, the questions about what artificial minds might do to human society. Reading Wells is a useful corrective to that vanity. He confronted versions of all these fears more than a hundred years ago, and his responses still feel uncannily fresh. He understood that every new power humanity acquires is morally neutral in itself, taking its character from the hands that wield it. He understood that progress is not a straight line marching upward but a branching, contingent thing that can lead to paradise or catastrophe depending on choices we may not even recognize we are making. He understood that the human capacity for cruelty and self-deception scales up alongside our capacity for invention, so that each new tool is also a new temptation. These are not the comforting platitudes of an optimist or the despairing groans of a pessimist. They are the clear-eyed observations of a man who refused to look away from either the wonder or the danger of the world he saw coming.

It is worth saying something about Wells’s politics and his temperament, because they color these stories in ways a modern reader should understand. He was, throughout his life, a reformer and a believer in human improvement. He thought that humanity could, through reason, education, and the deliberate reorganization of society, build something far better than the brutal and wasteful world he was born into. He dreamed of a world state, of universal education, of the abolition of poverty and ignorance and war. This utopian streak ran deep, and it would dominate his later, more didactic writing. But—and this is crucial to appreciating his finest fiction—the utopian Wells was always shadowed by a darker, more skeptical Wells, the biologist who knew how easily nature undoes the works of mind, the historian who saw how often human beings betray their own best hopes. In the short stories gathered here, the two Wellses are held in productive tension. The optimism gives the work its forward-looking energy, its sense that the future is genuinely open and worth thinking hard about; the pessimism gives it its gravity, its refusal of easy answers, its willingness to imagine that things might go terribly wrong. The result is a body of work far richer and more troubling than either pure optimism or pure pessimism could produce.

For readers coming to these stories for the first time, a few words of guidance may enhance the experience. First, resist the urge to read them as quaint period pieces, charming relics of a vanished world of gas lamps and hansom cabs. The settings are indeed of their time, and there is pleasure in their atmosphere, but the questions the stories ask are entirely live. When you read about a man whose great discovery isolates him from his fellows, think about the scientists and engineers of our own day. When you read about a society whose certainties are challenged by an outsider’s different way of seeing, think about the clashes of worldview that fill our own news. Wells wrote about the future, and in many respects, we are living in it. The stories speak to us not despite their age but because of it; they have had time to prove their durability.