H.G. Wells: The Dover Reader

Published by Dover on February 17, 2016

H.G. Wells is rightly regarded as a pioneer of science fiction. The four novels/novellas collected in this edition have all been filmed, some more than once, which attests to Wells’ skill as a story-teller. As a prose stylist, Wells created rambling, ponderous sentences that require the reader to engage in a good amount of labor before reaching the end. It is nevertheless a style that tends to grow on readers, contributing to the continued popularity of his books. But Wells’ popularity is primarily due to his imaginative creation of themes that modern science fiction writers continue to embrace.

The novellas in this Dover edition are:

The Time Machine (1895) - Probably the most “literary” of Wells’ works, The Time Machine is important in the history of science fiction as one of the first widely-read time travel stories. The distant future Wells imagines, populated by above-ground Eloi and underground Morlocks, is a forerunner of novels that depict a dystopian future. The novel might best be seen as an allegory of class struggle, although scholars have blessed it with a variety of academic interpretations. The Time Machine is probably the most discussed of Wells’ works, and it might be his most popular, given the number of times it has been adapted to film, television, and comics, as well as the number of books and stories that have been derived from it or paid tribute to it.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) - Wells ventured into horror with this story of a biologist who is stranded on a remote island with a doctor and a “mad scientist” whose experiments have transformed animals into man-like beasts. A forerunner of modern novels that address genetic experimentation, The Island of Dr. Moreau is notable for its exploration of the difference (and more importantly, the similarity) between man and beast.

The Invisible Man (1897) - A scientist experimenting with optics figures out how to bend light in a way that makes him invisible. While largely an adventure story, the novella has a moral lesson, as the scientist, who uses his discovery for nefarious purposes, comes to a bad end. The novella’s literary value comes from the sympathy that Wells creates for the scientist, even as Wells makes it clear that the Invisible Man is responsible for his own undoing.

War of the Worlds (1898) - One of the first popular stories to imagine contact between humans and aliens, War of the Worlds was famously adapted as a radio play that shook up the nation, and has been filmed repeatedly. In addition to working as an adventure story, the novel touches on important issues of imperialism, evolution, and religion. War of the Worlds is one of the most influential works in the history of science fiction, having inspired an entire subgenre of “alien invasion” stories, most of which (the ones in which aliens are imagined as evil lizards) are quite awful in comparison to Wells’ story.

Wells wrote some or all of these works as serials, so they overlapped a bit, but the fact that he was able to produce four of the most important works of science fiction in roughly four years is stunning. No literature class that covers science fiction would be complete without including at least one of Wells’ novels.

The Dover collection also includes five short stories of varying quality: “The Stolen Bacillus,” “The Country of the Blind,” “The Purple Pileus,” “The Crystal Egg,” and “The Door in the Wall.” They are all entertaining, but readers will get more bang for their buck from Wells’ longer works.

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