THE COLLECTOR'S BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION BY H. G. WELLS - FROM RATE, ORIGINAL, ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES

by H.G. Wells

You can now read H.G. Wells' most famous science fiction exactly as it appeared in illustrated popular magazines at the turn of the century.Presented here in their entirety - with all the original illustrations by leading artists of the day - are novels such as The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and When the Sleeper Wakes; nearly two dozen short stories, including the well known The Country of the Blind, The Empire of the Ants, The Valley of the Spiders, and The Man Who Could Work Miracles; and as a bonus, the five unusual Stories of the Stone Age (science fiction not of the future but of the past).The Collector's Book of Science Fiction by H.G. Wells makes it possible to recapture the authentic flavor of the these thrilling stories - some not seen even by collectors for decades.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Classics, Short Stories, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels, Fantasy

514 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's apprentice as a teenager. The headmaster of Midhurst Grammar School, where he had spent a year, arranged for him to return as an "usher," or student teacher. Wells earned a government scholarship in 1884, to study biology under Thomas Henry Huxley at the Normal School of Science. Wells earned his bachelor of science and doctor of science degrees at the University of London. After marrying his cousin, Isabel, Wells began to supplement his teaching salary with short stories and freelance articles, then books, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wells created a mild scandal when he divorced his cousin to marry one of his best students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Although his second marriage was lasting and produced two sons, Wells was an unabashed advocate of free (as opposed to "indiscriminate") love. He continued to openly have extra-marital liaisons, most famously with Margaret Sanger, and a ten-year relationship with the author Rebecca West, who had one of his two out-of-wedlock children. A one-time member of the Fabian Society, Wells sought active change. His 100 books included many novels, as well as nonfiction, such as A Modern Utopia (1905), The Outline of History (1920), A Short History of the World (1922), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). One of his booklets was Crux Ansata, An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. Although Wells toyed briefly with the idea of a "divine will" in his book, God the Invisible King (1917), it was a temporary aberration. Wells used his international fame to promote his favorite causes, including the prevention of war, and was received by government officials around the world. He is best-remembered as an early writer of science fiction and futurism.

He was also an outspoken socialist. Wells and Jules Verne are each sometimes referred to as "The Fathers of Science Fiction". D. 1946.

More: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/H._...

http://www.online-literature.com/well...

http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells

Reviews

[ade_reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hi, you... scifi lover? This should be added to your the list right now!

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great selection of stories by HG Wells. Some are short stories.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! Entertaining short stories with visionary insights, written at the turn of the twentieth century.

When The Sleeper Awakes was particularly interesting. A man from a rural English town falls into a sleep and wakes 200 years later, being thrown into a society advanced but not so different than the one he left!

Wells' writing is very descriptive and pulls you in to the moment. Passages like 'The darkness filtered away so imperceptibly that at no moment could one declare decisively that one could see.' leave you saying 'yeah, I have been there!'

[William]

Honestly prefer his short fiction over any of his long fiction...

[Bill Yancey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Politically incorrect, but it's over one hundred years old. Also boring in places. This was my bathroom book for about three years.

[D.L. Morrese · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this collection are presented complete with illustrations as they originally appeared in the magazines of the time. Reading them is like stepping backward a century to the origins of the genre we now call science fiction. It’s an enlightening trip. This was a different world in some ways, culturally, politically, and technologically. When these were written, people still speculated about the existence of complex life on Mars, Venus, and the Moon, and in some of these stories, we see this possibility explored. Much of it may seem almost laughable now, but we have the benefit of an additional century of scientific exploration, orbiting space probes, robotic rovers, and manned moon missions. I don’t doubt that a century from now many of our current conjectures will seem quaint to our children’s grandchildren. I did find myself surprised at how dreadfully bad some of the basic science was, though. This included misunderstanding the effects of gravity, microgravity, and inertia. The worst offenders were The First Men in the Moon and The Man Who Could Work Miracles.
Wells did foresee things like video and sound recording, but he imagines enormous hardware being required. He also foresees flying machines, but these are light, flimsy things rather like ultra-lights, or lighter than air ships like blimps or zeppelins. What never seems to have been foreseen by any of the early speculative fiction writers are computers, miniature electronics, or something like the internet. This certainly is not a failing. They extrapolated from what they knew to imagine amazing devices of clockwork and electricity, and while these are certainly very cool, they are not what peopled eventually created.
Some of the ‘soft’ science fiction elements hit far from the mark as well. In When the Sleeper Wakes, for example, a revolution is going on in Twenty-second Century London with the goal of emancipating people from near serfdom, restore freedom and human dignity, and all that, but yet everyone is appalled when the antagonist of the story calls in enforcers from Africa to quell the uprisings -- because they’re black! Is this irony, or did Wells honestly not see the inherent conflict here? I’m pretty sure he was making a satirical point when he spoke of a future in which they had changed the numbering system to base twelve rather than changing the currency and measures to a decimal system, so it’s quite possible this was also a case of subtle irony. (In Victorian England, 12 inches made a foot and 12 pence made a shilling. There are still 12 inches to a foot, of course, but they eventually adopted the metric system and also abandoned the 12 pence shilling.)
It is easy to pick at all the things that Wells gets wrong, but I doubt very much he was trying to predict the future accurately any more than something like Star Trek (TOS) was. Wells was writing for the people of the time about the people of the time. The stories here are about the people of England and their view of the world as it raced into the Twentieth Century, and it gives us in the Twenty-first Century a better idea of what they were like. In this light, these are great stories and well worth reading. I recommend them.

These stories are included in this anthology:
• The War of the Worlds (Novel, serialized in Pearson’s Magazine, April-December 1897)
• The Country of the Blind (Short Story, The Strand Magazine, April 1904)
• The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (Short Story, Pearson’s Magazine, April 1905)
• Aepyornis Island (Short Story, Pearson’s Magazine, February 1905)
• The First Men in the Moon (Novel, Serialized in The Strand Magazine, December 1900-August 1901)
• The Diamond Maker (Short Story, Pearson’s Magazine, March 1905)
• The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (Short Story, The Strand Magazine, March 1902)
• The Empire of the Ants (Short Story, The Strand Magazine, December 1905)
• Stories of the Stone Age (Short Story/Novella, Serialized in The Idler, May-November 1897)
• The Stolen Bacillus (Short Story, Pearson’s Magazine, June 1905)
• In the Abyss (Short Story, Pearson’s Magazine, August 1896)
• The Valley of Spiders (Short Story, Pearson’s Magazine, March 1903)
• When the Sleeper Wakes (Novel, Serialized in The Graphic 1898-1899)
• The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Short Story, The Illustrated London News, July 1898)
• The Land Ironclads (Short Story, The Strand Magazine, December 1903)

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I'd read anything by Wells previously, although I knew the basic outlines of some of his stories from other sources and popular culture in general. This volume includes the full novels The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and When the Sleeper Wakes, all printed in the form in which they originally appeared when serialized in magazines, as well as several short stories. Some of them are fairly forgettable, but they all show a large amount of creativity. It's interesting to read old science fiction to see what they got right and wrong. Wells correctly predicated human voyages to the Moon, synthetic diamonds, airplanes, and tanks; although the details were somewhat off. Some of his best work, however, came when he let his imagination run wild and come up with such things like the bizarre flora and fauna of the Moon, or the ornate but oppressive future into which the Sleeper wakes. Wells freely acknowledges his antecedents in such sorts of fiction, like Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon for space travel and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward for someone waking up in the far future. And to today's scientists, why hasn't Cavorite been discovered yet?

[Tamara aka SoMysteriousLee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this in 4th-5th grade, so not too long after it was originally printed. I recently acquired a copy that was printed in 1986 with a dust jacket featuring a scene from "War of the Worlds". That particular copy isn't in the Goodreads database and wouldn't let me put the picture of the dust jacket when I tried to create a 'new book' but nonetheless it's still a fantastic read of his imaginative tales along with the accompanying pictures published during the first time his works were printed.

[Dirck Lint · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apart from having a lot of Wells's short stories all in one place, it's a compiling of facsimiles of their original magazine presentations. It's a fun contrivance, and while the experience is not quite the same as it would have been for the late Victorian reader, it's certainly interesting.

[Nik Luhrs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed the short stories contained within this book. Long gone is the golden age of sci-fi but with books like this it is easy to look back on those days and enjoy all they had to offer. To be fair the longer works I have not read so my review only applies to the short stories.

[Eleanor White · Rating 4 out of 5]

War of the Worlds is in here. Say no more!