H. G. Wells

Once a brilliant scientist, Griffin has been gradually consumed by his research. When he finally achieves his goal—becoming completely invisible—the final result is his departure from humanity. He feels no remorse in using his invisibility to gratify his increasing desires. As he gradually loses his mind, it is hard to determine if it is a result of his chemical concoction or a simple continuation of his moral decline.


At...

The Red Room is a short Gothic story written by H. G. Wells in 1894. It was first published in the March 1896 edition of The Idler magazine. An unnamed protagonist chooses to spend the night in an allegedly haunted room, coloured bright red in Lorraine Castle. He intends to disprove the legends surrounding it. Despite vague warnings from the three infirm custodians who reside in the castle, the narrator ascends to "the Red Room" to begin his night's...

H.G. Wells at his best! The Island of Doctor Moreau is a chilling tale of secrets and shadows woven by the masterful pen of H.G. Wells, who is considered one of the fathers of science fiction. First published in 1896, this is the story of Edward Prendick, an Englishman who finds himself stranded on a remote island in the South Pacific after being shipwrecked. The island is home to Dr Moreau, an eminent physiologist from London who has fled England...

The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells. The protagonist of The History of Mr. Polly is an antihero inspired by H. G. Wells's early experiences in the drapery trade: Alfred Polly, born circa 1870, a timid and directionless young man living in Edwardian England, who despite his own bumbling achieves contented serenity with little help from those around him. Mr. Polly's most striking characteristic is his "innate sense of epithet",...

"For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived." Embark on a journey hundreds of thousands of years into the future on a homemade time machine! The Time Traveler discovers what he first perceives as a perfect pastoral landscape inhabited by an evolved form of humanity, but soon he discovers the dark...

The Door in the Wall, considered by both readers and critics, to be Wells's finest tale, examines an issue to which Wells returned repeatedly in his writing: the contrast between aesthetics and science and the difficulty of choosing between them. This collection also includes The Star, A Dream of Armageddon, The Cone, A Moonlight Fable, The DiamondMaker, The Lord of the Dynamos, and The Country of the Blind.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic work of early science fiction and one of H. G. Wells' most visionary novels. It recounts the harrowing ordeal of Edward Prendick, an Englishman who survives a shipwreck in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rescued by a man named Montgomery, Prendick finds himself on an island belonging to Dr. Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist in London who was expelled from his homeland for his cruel vivisection experiments. Prendick...

The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialized in The English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells's affair with Amber Reeves and satirized Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was "the literary scandal of its day". The New Machiavelli purports to be written in the first person by its protagonist, Richard "Dick" Remington, who has a lifelong passion for "statecraft" and who dreams of recasting the social...

The intricately narrated story involves a mermaid who comes ashore on the southern coast of England in 1899. Feigning a desire to become part of genteel society, the mermaid's real design is to seduce Chatteris, a man she saw "some years ago" in "the South Seas-near Tonga," who has taken her fancy. This she reveals in a conversation with the narrator's second cousin Melville, a friend of the family that adopts Miss Waters. As a supernatural being...

Sarnac may have become a successful scientist, a leading light in the research of chemical reactions of cells, but he would never forget the dream. It was a dream he had had as a young child, a dream that was both beautiful and terrifying; frighteningly real and marvelously imaginary. And as Sarnac looks back on his childhood, he finds the world of his dreams and the reality he has lived have become so magically entwined that he can no longer distinguish...