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Audiobook editionPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 362 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 362 pagesAbout this book
A stolen vial, a giant egg, a haunted room: how little does it take to unsettle your world?
In Thirty Strange Stories, H. G. Wells turns single odd ideas into sharp encounters with the unknown. In The Stolen Bacillus, a bacteriologist shows a visitor a tube he claims contains a deadly disease. In The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, quiet collector Winter-Wedderburn buys a rare root and tends it with growing devotion.
Elsewhere, machines inspire awe, unfamiliar life brings danger, and confidence meets fear. The Lord of the Dynamos follows engineer Holroyd and his assistant Azuma-zi among electric railway engines. The Red Room sends a visitor who dismisses ghosts into a haunted chamber. Across this collection, comedy, cruelty, dread and quiet sadness keep changing the mood.
What you’ll discover
- Small ideas, sharp consequences Watch Wells follow a strange premise toward trouble, testing the limits of human pride.
- An egg on an island Join stranded Butcher in Aepyornis Island, where a huge egg raises an unsettling question.
- An offer worth questioning Meet Eden in The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham as he accepts a stranger's friendly offer.
- A schoolmaster's changed life Enter The Plattner Story, where a chemical accident changes the life of Gottfried Plattner.
- Laughter beside the shiver Discover tales that move between comic trouble and fear, with room for quiet sadness.
Who will love it
Readers who love strange science, ghostly rooms, deep-sea monsters and dark jokes will enjoy this collection. It suits fans of Victorian London and short tales of many moods.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- An ordinary day slips sideways
- A quiet passion invites danger
- Evidence leaves room for doubt
- Generosity can conceal a threat
- Fear changes with its setting
- Machines put courage to the test
- The mind travels beyond the body
- Old passions keep pursuing people
- One strange fact changes a life
Who’s who
- Winter-WedderburnA shy, lonely orchid grower who longs for something to happen to him, and buys a shriveled root at auction.
- ButcherA scarred collector who tells how he was stranded on an atoll with an egg of a giant extinct bird.
- Gottfried PlattnerA modest language teacher at a small school whose chemistry experiment with a green powder sends him somewhere no one can follow.
- Edward George EdenA young medical student, poor and healthy, who is courted by a mysterious old philosopher offering him an inheritance.
- ElsteadA cheerful naturalist who has himself lowered five miles into the ocean in a padded steel sphere.
- HapleyA quarrelsome entomologist who cannot stop thinking about his dead rival, Professor Pawkins, and sees a moth no one else can see.
- Mr. CoombesA small, harassed shopkeeper who walks into the woods after a family quarrel, sick of life.
- Azuma-ziA stoker in a London dynamo shed who comes to worship the great machine as a god.
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Thirty Strange Stories
by H. G. Wells · 1897
After a visitor steals a sealed laboratory container, a scientist in carpet slippers pursues a cab through London.
Medium level5–10 hours to read20 languages
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“remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the despair, which are embodied in the technology and which are the major facts of life in our world”
In short
What would you do if a stranger raised a glass of liqueur and asked you to drink to a quick succession? Or if a quiet bachelor came home from an auction with a dried root that nobody could name?
Thirty Strange Stories at a glance
- Reading time
- About 7 h 40 min6 h 5 min fast, 9 h 10 min slow
- Length
- 109,700 words
- Library level
- Medium longer sentences, everyday words
- First published
- 1897by H. G. Wells
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A shy collector buys an orchid nobody can name
The book opens with The Strange Orchid and a man named Winter-Wedderburn. He is shy and lonely, with just enough money to live. His one passion is a small steamy greenhouse of orchids. At breakfast on the day of an auction he says he has a feeling that something is going to happen to him.
His housekeeper hears those words with alarm. Wedderburn goes up to London and buys a shriveled root from plants collected in the Andaman Islands. The young collector who gathered it was found dead in a swamp, drained of blood by leeches. The housekeeper says the root looks like a spider pretending to be dead. When it wakes in its pot, pale rootlets reach out like fingers, and Wedderburn only smiles.
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After a visitor steals a sealed laboratory container, a scientist in carpet slippers pursues a cab through London.
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Details
- First published
- 1897
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 8 h 35 min
- Level
- Medium level
- Paperback
- 362 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Hardcover
- 362 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Large print paperback
- 626 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Large print hardcover
- 626 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Delivery and returns
- Printed when you order. Usually here in 12 to 14 days.Arrives Tue 1 Dec to Mon 7 Decto United States, printed for you at cost
For Christmas, order by Thu 12 Nov
Cite this edition
Wells, H. G. Thirty Strange Stories. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/thirty-strange-stories.
Wells, H. G. (2026). Thirty strange stories. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/thirty-strange-stories (Original work published 1897)
Wells, H. G. Thirty Strange Stories. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/thirty-strange-stories.
@book{wells2026thirty,
author = {Wells, H. G.},
title = {Thirty Strange Stories},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/thirty-strange-stories},
note = {First published 1897}
}
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What is Thirty Strange Stories about?
It is a collection of short tales by H. G. Wells that mixes science fiction, horror, comedy and the uncanny. Each story puts an ordinary person in front of one strange fact, such as a giant egg, a living orchid or a vanished teacher.
When were the stories in Thirty Strange Stories written?
Wells wrote these tales in the 1890s, and many first appeared in magazines before their collection in book form. You can see the period in the cabs, gaslight, laboratories and early talk of flying machines and a fourth dimension.
Are the stories in Thirty Strange Stories true?
No, they are fiction. Several narrators insist that every detail is accurate, as in The Plattner Story and The Sea Raiders, but that claim is part of the game. Wells builds each tale on real science and invented events.
The author
H. G. Wells
1866–1946 · English science fiction novelist
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer born in Bromley, Kent. He wrote novels, short stories and nonfiction. His novels included The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). He died in London.
“Nothing ever happens to me.”
More by H. G. Wells
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