The H.G. Wells Reader Read Online Free

to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but these glimpses of the educational methods of these beings have affected me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off and I may be able to see more of this aspect of this wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand sticking out of its jar seemed to appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.” (163)
    Startlingly different tonalities play against each other here: the cool recitation of this “curious and interesting process,” the pathos of the little Selenite’s conditioning, the disturbingly incompatible languages—”being drawn out and broken in” as “educational methods”—Cavor’s effort to overcome his natural revulsion and admire “this wonderful social order,” and finally the wrenching refocusing at the end when this terrible conditioning is understood as benign compared to the horrors of
laissez faire
industrialism. Profound questions that will plague the twentieth century—of sociological and cultural objectivity, of intuition and reason, of controlled and free economies—are all raised in strong articulation in this amazing passage.
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    If Wells is an author who thinks through fiction, however, he is also one attuned to the sheer pleasure that fiction can provide. He is a great descriptive artist. Againand again in the most fanciful invention, he startles us with precise detail. Even after an idea is established, he will continue to think about it and discover new implications, as in
The Invisible Man
when we discover how vulnerable this supposedly superior man is to such elemental dangers as broken glass and cold. In natural descriptions he takes pleasure in word painting, as in the elegant and symbolic sunsets in
War of the Worlds
. Nowhere is Wells’s descriptive talent put to more impressive use than in the scenes in
The Time Machine
when the Time Traveler moves farthest into the future and finds the desolate beach, the dying sun, and the last feeble (though still threatening) signs of life. Before everything else, H. G. Wells is a brilliant storyteller. If he has an eye for small details that make implausible things believable and an ear for the tricks of language that make characters real, then he has a talent for plots that have clear shape, with startling beginnings, developed middles, and meaningful ending.
    Between 1924 and 1928 Wells himself published a collected edition of his work in twenty-four volumes, “The Atlantic Edition.” It was limited to 1,670 copies and is generally to be found only in well-stocked libraries. In recent years scholarly editions of some of the early novels (
The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau
) have begun to appear, and a good number of the social novels are occasionally reprinted in paperback. Unfortunately, these last tend to go out of print fairly quickly, and one must be alert to find them. The exception is
Tono-Bungay
, which has been reprinted more often than the other social novels. Wells himself described his career and the goals of his work in
An Experiment in Autobiography
(1934). Long after his death, a supplementary manuscript describing some of his love affairs was published by his son, G. P. Wells, under the title
H. G. Wells in Love
(1985). In the first decades after his death, Wells’s letters to Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and George Gissing were published in separate volumes, and
The Collected Letters of H. G. Wells
, edited by David Smith, was published in 1992.
    I have selected the texts for this anthology with an eye to quality and to what I see as the central issues and styles of Wells. In the