★★★ The Stolen Bacillus, 1894 (pg. 12-16)

Biological warfare involving a hilarious mistake. Read it online here.

★★★ The Hammerpond Park Burglary, 1894 (pg. 17-21)

A humorous tale about a bungling burlar who is mistaken for a hero.

★★★ The Flowering Of The Strange Orchid, 1894 (pg. 22-27)

A horror tale about a man-eating orchid.

★★★ In The Avu Observatory, 1894 (pg. 28-32)

An unknown creature attacks a star-gazer at night.

★★★★ Aepyornis Island, 1894 (pg. 33-39)

With N-words thrown in for good measure, here is an adventure tale about a man who discovered viable eggs from an extinct bird species. (I would have given this one five stars, if not for the repeated racism.)

★★★★ The Time Machine, 1895 (pg. 40-87)

I’d obviously read this one before, two or three times. Still, much of it seemed a new tale to me. I was surprised to note that Wells predicted that in the future humans would lose the differentiation between the sexes: “In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike.” A lot of thought and planning clearly went into this story, which was Wells’ first “novel” (though it’s only 33,000 words, meaning today it would be a novella, far too short to be considered a novel). Read it online here.

★★ The Temptation Of Harringay, 1895 (pg. 88-91)

A painting somehow becomes The Devil and tries to bargain with the painter. At least that’s what the painter claims.

★★★ The Moth, 1895 (pg. 92-98)

Describing a descent into madness, this story is about a bitter rivalry between two scientists, one of whom dies and the other of whom hallucinates that the former is haunting him as a new species of moth.

★★★★ The Remarkable Case Of Davidson’s Eye, 1895 (pg. 99-105)

During a thunderstorm, while working in a lab, one man suddenly can’t see anything around him, but can see perfectly several thousand miles away (he can still hear, feel, taste, smell his current location; only his sight is affected). Interestingly, the place he can see is the Antipodes Islands, which are very nearly exactly on the opposite side of Earth from London (more accurately, they are opposite a small French village, but close enough for this story). The case lasts for three weeks, and there is no explanation.

★★ The Cone, 1895 (pg. 106-112)

It wasn’t clear, but I think this story was about a jealous husband murdering his wife’s lover via the heat of an ironworks.

★★ The Reconciliation, 1895 (pg. 113-117)

Two old friends, apparently at odds over some past event that is never described, get into an impromptu boxing match (as friends do?) and one kills the other.

★★★ Under The Knife, 1896 (pg. 118-126)

A man who’s certain he’ll die when undergoing surgery has an out-of-body experience that he’s convinced is death (but later returns to his body after it turns out he didn’t die). This one got an extra point for the descriptions of Earth and the Solar System as he became detached from matter.

★★ The Red Room, 1896 (pg. 127-132)

Investigating reports of a haunting, a man encounters unexplained paranormal activity inside a room in a castle. Read it online here.

★★ The Plattner Story, 1896 (pg. 133-144)

A schoolteacher, by way of the explosion of a mysterious green powder, has been catapulted into an alternate world, one that overlays this one but can’t be seen from here. Everything there is black, poorly lit by a green sun. They can see us, though, and Mr. Plattner was there for nine days, observing both worlds. Read it online here.

★★★★ The Story Of The Late Mr. Elvesham, 1896 (pg. 145-155)

A youthful, healthy man is approached by a declining older man who says he’s looking for just such a young man to which he can bequeath his substantial wealth. The young man agrees, but over dinner ingests a potion that — during that night’s sleep — transposes the two men’s consciousnesses into each other’s bodies. Read it online here.

★★★ In The Abyss, 1896 (pg. 156-165)

A steel sphere containing a man is dropped five miles to the ocean floor, where he observes a society of deep sea people (who believe he has descended from heaven) before rising once more to the surface to tell his tale. Read it online here.

★★ The Apple, 1896 (pg. 166-170)

A man meets a stranger who offers him a golden, apple-like fruit which he claims is The Forbidden Fruit; he tells a story to back up this claim, which the first man believes. He takes the apple, but then tosses it away. (Apparently, in those days, it was embarrassing for a man to be seen holding a fruit? This is repeatedly indicated in the text.) Read it online here.

★★★ The Sea Raiders, 1896 (pg. 171-177)

Giant cephalapods come to shore to feast on humans before being driven away. Read it online here.

★★★ The Crystal Egg, 1897 (pg. 178-188)

A shop owner discovers that if he peers into a particular egg-shaped crystal at certain times, he can perceive cities and creatures on Mars, and so he refuses to sell it, but he dies before any further discoveries can be made, and other people can’t see what he sees in the egg. Read it online here.

★★★★ The Invisible Man, 1897 (pg. 189-269)

I thought I’d read this before, but once I began reading, every bit of it seemed new to me. It’s better-written than The Time Machine, maybe the best story in this book. The ideas were fully worked out before the story began, and it used the somewhat modern convention of beginning partway through the story to leave the reader guessing until the background is filled in later. My only complaint in this story was the repeated bigotry.. (Note: these remarks were in quotations — from a character already established to be a not good person.) Read it online here.

★★★★★ The Star, 1897 (pg. 270-276)

I found nothing to dislike about this one. The story is about humanity noticing an approaching star that collides with Neptune and makes its way toward Earth, seemingly about to annihilate all life on the only habitable planet — but it misses us just in time. The building sense of terror/dread was palpable and the sense of relief was strong at the end. The added final paragraph is also noteworthy. Read it online here.

★★★★★ The Man Who Could Work Miracles, 1898 (pg. 277-287)

Another fantastic one, about a man who suddenly discovers he can work miracles. It comes to a sharp and worthwhile conclusion involving the stoppage of the Earth’s rotation (a la Joshua 10:11-13, but with more realistic effects.) Read it online here.

★★★ The Stolen Body, 1898 (pg. 288-297)

A man who succeeds in having an out-of-body experience discovers that once one leaves one’s body, the body can then be easily taken over by other disembodied intelligences, who don’t always do the the most moral things when in control of one’s abandoned body. Read it online here.

★★★★ A Story Of The Days To Come, 1899 (pg. 298-351)

This is the third “novel” (novella) contained in this book, a story of life in 22nd Century London. Wells makes so many marvellous predictions (some astoundingly accurate and others hilariously incorrect) that this one could do with a review of its own. The story is of two young lovers coming to grips with their lives — in a world involving mass air travel, country-spanning multilane highways, industrial agriculture, and global monolopolistic corporations. The lovers fall upon hard times and descend from a comfortable middle class into the underworld of Labor, where they have to (gasp) perform labor for a pittance. The story wobbles at the end and their antagonist (for reasons unexplained) becomes their benefactor and everything works out for them. If not for the weak ending, I might have bestowed five stars here. Read it online here.

★★★ A Dream Of Armageddon, 1901 (pg. 352-368)

The narrator meets a man on the train who tells him about his (the second man’s) dreams, which seemed very realistic. The dreams were of the future, a world war that involved metal-clad flying machines and millions of soldiers. The man who dreamed said he was the lone person who had the power to stop it, but it would have meant abandoning the woman he loved, so he stayed with her while the war developed. Interesting concept, but I took off points for the odd way of telling it. This one included an interesting quote about the leader, named Evesham, who caused the war, and it reminded me of someone more current:

“He was one of those incredibly stupid energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters. His energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot luck to pull him through.”

—page 360

★★★★★ The New Accelerator, 1901 (pg. 369-377)

This regards a fictional drug concoction which, when ingested, causes a person to operate at hundreds (or thousands) of times the speed of ordinary individuals. But it only lasts for half an hour. From the clear descriptions of action and setting, I was reminded vividly of scenes in recent shows and movies like The Flash in which the protagonist is moving so quickly that — from his viewpoint — everything else is standing still. For example: “I passed close to a little poodle dog suspended in the act of leaping, and watched the slow movement of his legs as he sank to earth.” Read it online here.

★★★ The Story Of The Inexperienced Ghost, 1902 (pg. 378-386)

A man meets and helps a weak and ineffectual ghost. Read it online here.

★★ The Valley Of Spiders, 1903 (pg. 387-393)

Apparently set in the American West, this story is about three men on horses who venture into a valley where they are overtaken by masses of giant spiders. I took off points mostly for ambiguity — it was difficult to tell which man was which and what was happening and where they were going and why.

★★★ The Magic Shop, 1903 (pg. 394-400)

A man and his boy wander into a Magic Shop and acquire a few toys and tricks. It was remarkable as the first of these stories featuring a child as a main character, but otherwise seemed to have no plot; just a description of the father and son’s trip into and through the store. Read it online here.

★★★ The Land Ironclads, 1903 (pg. 401-414)

Like the spider story above, this one was amgiguous and difficult to follow. It was never clear to me which side of the battle was whom, or where the trenches were, or what anyone was fighting about. The remarkable thing is in the title. Extrapolating from what he knew of the (relatively new) internal combustion engine, and the less recent innovation in fighting ships with iron armor, Wells conceived land vehicles with a system of pedrail wheels, armored about with metal and housing multiple gun turrets. This was years before any military or company had built or conceived of a tank. (See history of the tank.) Read it online here.

★★★★ The Country Of The Blind, 1904 (pg. 415-430)

When a mountaineer in South American stumbles (literally) upon a secluded valley village comprised entirely of blind people, he momentarily supposes he is superior to them all, but soon learns that generations of blindness have restructured their society and socialization to the point that he really has no advantage. It was a surprisingly intuitive look at how a society might be differently formed if it took differing abilities into account. Read it online here.

★★★ The Empire Of The Ants, 1905 (pg. 431-441)

A boat captain on the Amazon is ordered to investigate a swarm of ants plaguing a distant town. The main character is described as “a Creole” and inflections of language led me to believe he wasn’t white — which was surprising after the obvious racism on display in previous stories. They eventually discover a drifting boat taken over by seemingly intelligent ants, and then an abandoned town where victorious ants are in abundance. It felt like the beginnings of a truly cool story, but then kind of petered out at the end. Read it online here.

★★ The Door In The Wall, 1911 (pg. 442-452)

The narrator listens to a friend tell a long and boring story about a door he found as a five-year-old, which (purportedly) led to a magical garden, and all the times he later saw the door but didn’t go through it for whatever reason. Then the man died. Read it online here.

★★ The Story Of The Last Trump, 1915 (pg. 453-462)

I was disappointed that this wasn’t a long-distance prediction of the current presidency, but instead it was about a magical trumpet that accidentally fell out of Heaven one day and some guys found it at a second-hand shop in London. When they manage to blow this trumpet, it causes everyone on Earth to have a split-second vision of God, but it doesn’t really change anything.

★★ The Queer Story Of Brownlow’s Newspaper, 1932 (pg. 463-474)

The narrator’s friend received a newspaper from 1971 by accident, so he was able to read news 40 years ahead of time. But he wasn’t able to say much about it, except for one scrap he saved about a timber shortage. So the story was mostly vague and ambiguous. Nearly pointless. Read it online here.