Seven H.G. Wells novels bound in a purple leather cover, with amazing cover art. This book is a wonderful addition to my library.

Always wanted to read the original Time Machine novel.

More of a short story really in essence. More or less what I expected, but the film was in my mind throughout.

Indeed the film was better than the book in this case. None of the World Wars or the apocalyptic stuff in here. Nor indeed the 'Filbey' connection. All told in retrospect.

Disappointing, but considering it was written over 100 years ago, historically of interest.

The second novel, The Island of Dr Moreau wasn't bad and this time I hadn't seen the film(s) (?)
A mariners tale shall we say. The subject matter, well told, is the attempted humanising of animals. Quite nasty in parts. Yeah, not bad, not bad at all.

The Invisible Man was boring. The man himself, Griffin, was a bad tempered old sod who seems to enjoy thumping everybody until a navvy hits him over the head with a spade. Didn't half drag this one.

And there, I stopped.

Didn't fancy the First Men on The Moon, especially as I had the Clangers/Ben and Holly go to the moon in my head. I guess that is a posthumous insult to Mr Wells, but I didn't feel I could read it properly with kids programmes running through my mind. So I'll blame my Granddaughter and leave it at at that.

I suspect I'll come back to the other stories at some juncture. Until then this heavyweight tome will take up residence in my bottom drawer until such time as Ben and Holly's little Kingdom is annihilated by German dive bombers.

From one of the fathers of 20th century science fiction. He taught us that science was amazing and was going to kick our asses all over the place.

beautiful book with his most famous works

Given to me by an uncle 40+ years ago, I finally sat down with several classic tales of early science fiction.

Midway through the Island of Dr Moreau, I realized that most if not all of these works are dystopian or frankly horror in theme/content/genre.

I looked up the plot summaries on Wikipedia, deciding to turn my reading diet to less horror themed novels. I did find out that First Men in the Moon had an effect on CS Lewis, one of my favorite authors, and his Sci-Fi literature.

All good. Too many books, not enough time. Certainly classics of the sci fi genre with widespread influence and acclaim, but I am not much into horror and such.

Imagine my joy in inheriting this from my sister. I first read H G Wells in Sunderland library after listening to the Space Opera War of the Worlds. It started a life-long love of scifi ... I think I was around nine years old and had recently got an adult library card. I used to go to the library and get an Asimov and a Wells, then I went through the entire fiction section reading every book that looked like it was scifi ... alphabetically, but always checking the W section in case there was a Wells or Wyndham I had missed.

*While technically this is one of seven stories in a single volume, due to the amount of time it is taking me to finish the last story and the fact that each story is a novel in its own right, I have made the not-very-carefully considered decision to review each tale individually. I made the equally-carefully-considered decision to start with the second story in the book, because I can.
The Island of Dr Moreau
A creepy, disturbing story that has as much horror as science fiction, The Island of Dr Moreau explores the separation between humans and animals, ways to bridge that gap, the importance of ethics, and the limitations of behaviour modification. Cruelty to animals is a common theme throughout the narrative, if this is something you find deeply distressing I would skip this book entirely. It also has the standard level of racism for a book published in 1896, always a fun addition to any narrative. One of the things I did appreciate, and did not expect in the story, was Wells' consideration of the mental state of his narrator upon his return to society. Edward Prendick does not leave Moreau's island unchanged. To my untrained mind, it sounds as if his experience has left him with PTSD, although surely this book was written long before anyone coined the phrase. It adds an element of realism to a surreal tale of scientific discovery, ethics, and horror.
The Time Machine
One of the most well known HG Wells novels, The Time Machine is a story narrated to our narrator at a dinner party hosted by the inventor of said machine, after his weeks-long, mysterious disappearance and equally concerning return. Hosting skeptics and believers alike, he attempts to persuade them that he has in fact just returned from a trip to the far distant future, a world filled with beings barely recognizable as our descendants, and a whole second-class society tucked literally underground, representing simultaneously the oppressed working class agitating for change and a nebulous threat aiming to destroy society from within. I guess depending on your perspective both can be true; if you're part of the upper class and your position, power, and wealth depend on keeping the people beneath you exactly where they are with no more than what they already have, anyone pushing to reform that is "destroying society from within." These themes crop up repeatedly throughout Wells' works, although his attitudes towards them seem to change. The pastoral society Wells' protagonist travels to also resembles something pulled from a distant, bucolic past. There are no vast cities. The skies are devoid of cars/airplanes/carriages. Technology of any sort seems to be completely lacking and there is an unsettling dichotomy between an egalitarian-seeming, vegan upper class and the shunned, feared, carnivorous denizens of the nether world who appear to be responsible for the actual labour keeping the utopia...utopic. Disappointingly, rather than investigate the caste system the time traveller prefers to go exploring, set a bunch of stuff on fire, and then come home. That brings me to The Time Machine's most important lesson. One which is still relevant today: never leave your campfire unattended.
The Invisible Man
Having existed without having read hardly any HG Wells or having had much experience with his works (until very recently), I nevertheless managed to form some impression of the plot of a couple of his most famous works: The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man. Both of my impressions were completely wrong and bore no resemblance to either book, which has been weirdly disappointing and may have resulted in my not appreciating the stories as much as I would have had I been able to come to them with a clean slate and unformed expectations. But, here we are. The Invisible Man is another story crafted, it seems, to showcase the mediocre awfulness of the average man. It drops us in the middle of the plot when a strange guest arrives at a small town inn requesting a very private room, private meals, and remains constantly bundled even in the summer weather. As though he's hiding the ravages of leprosy. Shockingly, under his scarves and gloves and glasses lie not someone afflicted with leprosy, but someone who brewed an elixir granting them near-perfect invisibility and who realized too late he stopped his studies prematurely; after losing his original recipe and realizing he has failed to also craft an antidote. Finding invisibility less useful under these circumstances than he had hoped, he turns to crime. Robbery. Violence. Get-rich-quick schemes. While not a rollicking adventure by today's standards, The Invisible Man is still a good read. (Even if I still wish it was completely different.) It's easy to imagine the readers of yesteryear being glued to the page. And carefully bolting their doors at night so the invisible man can't sneak in to steal the silverware.
The First Men in the Moon
(Yes, the title is accurate. It's still weirding me out, but it makes sense when you read the book. Which you can. If you want. I guess.)
Twenty pages, when I count it, seems like a perfectly reasonable chunk of paper to allow for background and build up. Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor are going to the moon, after all. Surely we can allow them more than a few paragraphs to invent the method of travel which will take them there. In practice? Twenty pages became a barely tolerable burden. They blew up a house? Great. Don't care. Issues with their assistants? Well, it's 1901 so they're probably mad that you treat them like expendable crap and pay them a pittance, cut that out and they'll probably quit whining. Let's. Get. To. The. Moon! And we did. And it was weird. Wells was able to allow for the length of time it takes to travel to the moon - approximately three days, rather than a couple of hours - but pictured a completely fantastical landscape and society. Flora and fauna. An atmosphere. Like The Time Machine, we see the structure of this world only in glimpses until a clash of circumstance and egos separates our travellers and gives one of them an in-depth tour of this bizarre place. Mostly what struck me were things I don't believe Wells intended to be the take-away points of this story. Things like supporting characters with forced accents. The way Bedford and Cavor converse entirely in half-sentences. Bedford's intolerable cowardice and selfishness; by the end of the book I saw him almost as an anti-hero, I disagreed so deeply with the decisions he made. Again, this book was nothing like what I expected it to be and I think, if I had known in advance what it was going to be like, I would have skipped it entirely. If you are a huge fan of HG Wells or early sci fi I would definitely support you reading The First Men in the Moon, but if you aren't this is certainly one I think you could skip without guilt.
The Food of the Gods
Of the lesser known works by Wells, The Food of the Gods was the one I found most enjoyable. A mix of somewhat successful satire and social commentary, The Food of the Gods imagines a miracle substance which, when added to any being's dietary intake, produces incredible, unstoppable physical growth until the end of puberty. It appears to be addictive. Once something has started consuming the Food of the Gods it is a required part of the diet until growth is completed and Wells suggests that premature cessation would result in death. It's hard to be sure, as I'll explain further in a minute. The scientists who invented this miraculous goop, which they refer to as Herakleophorbia IV, envision it solving world hunger; to this end they hire a couple of farmers to feed it to chickens and track their growth. Unfortunately for the world these farmers are slobs. Improperly stored and handled Herakleophorbia is quickly ingested by every living creature around the farm, resulting in plagues of giant wasps, rats big enough to kill a horse, and stinging nettles the size of trees. And of course a couple people feed it to children. This is where the addictive aspect shows up; while non-human subjects don't seem to require a stable supply children fed Herakleophorbia get very upset when the concerned parent - only too happy to experiment on them mere weeks ago when they were a normal sized baby - stops dosing them. Eventually the constantly screaming child forces a return to the required dosage. Naturally, word gets out about this creation - dubbed "Boomfood" by the press - and uproar results. The final half of the novel revolves around the societal and class issues that crop up once there is a race of giants scattered around the globe: how are they to be fed? Housed? Clothed? Should they be treated as equals or used as a source of incredibly powerful manual labour and made into slaves? The last goes over about as well as you'd think and sparks a war between the now adult giants and the remnants of humanity. Wells declines to resolve these issues and leaves us on the brink of a complete overhaul of humanity. Or perhaps its destruction. That kind of felt like a cop-out, personally I love when an author tidies up all the loose ends, but it really makes The Food of the Gods feel especially relevant in today's climate of social and political upheaval. Here's hoping for a happy ending.
In the Days of the Comet
Despite being less than 200 pages, In the Days of the Comet took me over a month to read. I actively avoided it. Wells employs his now standard method of having the narrator relate to us a story told to him via another man's memoirs; in this case the narrator appears to have been teleported to a distant time and place where a kindly gentleman has just completed the aforementioned memoirs and is more than happy to allow this total stranger access to his account of a time of great upheaval in the world, namely the days immediately following the atmospheric impact of a mysterious green comet, for months prior growing larger in the sky. It effects a miraculous change on all of humanity with only a few hours of unconsciousness. Quite unfortunate if you were swimming or driving or manning a factory but I guess even visitors who come in peace should be allowed a few casualties. The kindly gentleman talks a lot about how he used to believe it was incredibly unfair that his girlfriend fell in love with someone else. So it's nice that the comet makes him stop thinking that, even if the whole scenario is weirdly anti-climactic. Wells wrote a story where a magical comet wipes all prejudice, selfishness, and cruelty off the face of the earth and still manages to make the dawn of a society of perfect equality and peace quite dull. Personally, once you get to the part where everyone wakes up after the comet lands, you may as well just stop. Nothing much happens. Save yourself the time. Everything works out quite nicely and some people even have open relationships, a discovery that rubs the narrator the wrong way but doesn't actually go anywhere. I feel like I should have been impressed, but it was like this story got published when it was still in the draft stage. Please excuse me, I'm gonna go read something trashy. With a plot.

A great book with all my favorite stories and I also enjoyed the introduction about Wells and how he come to write each of the stories. This is a must read

Its obvious this was one of the founders of Science Fiction.
The language a little distant from how we speak and read today, but very engaging stories nonetheless, even after all these years. Almost all classics we've all seen the movies of, or heard of. And in the days of the comet, he takes a very socialist view of things; almost a utopian novel.

We love these books from Barnes and Noble.

Time Machine - I think it was interesting and was surprised to read that this was the first instance of a time machine in a novel.

The Island of Dr. Moreau - I don't mind the religious overtones, mostly since I don't believe they correlate with my own. I think the book is interesting and rewarding, offering insights and thought-provoking ideas.

The Invisible Man - It is probably difficult to appreciate now how novel Wells' ideas really were at the time. I did like the perspective on how men react to power (though, I am a bit more optimistic than Wells).

It seems his books became more and more satircal and less and less about science fiction, though that seems always to have been a part of science fiction. Maybe that's why so many write and read science fiction - because they are unsatisfied with what this world presents.

I thought some of the social commentary was interesting, though reading became more of a chore in the later books. Of course, not being a fan of certain types of "progressivism" or any type of socialism or "sexual liberation", I found many of his veiled arguments distasteful (not to mention lacking in foundation and reason).

This book or these stories are a MUST READ for any reader! They form the spinal cord of many modern stories and films. One never tires reading them again and again.

The Time Machine: 4*
The Invisible Man: 4*
The Island of Dr Moreau: 4*
The War of the Worlds: 4.5*
The First Men in the Moon: 4.5*
The Food of the Gods: 4*
In the Days of the Comet: 4*