The Sea Lady

Herbert George Wells

This charming, little-known fantasy by the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds is also a sharply satirical look at the mores and moral of Edwardian England. During a family outing at the beach a family sees a young woman struggling further out in the water. Its only when they rescue her that they see that shes a mermaid. They quickly take her into the beach house, still unaware that the mermaid has planned the whole incident in order to meet a young man. Her motives are not quite clear; nor are her intentions of what she plans to do with the young man after she gets him, since she lives beneath the sea. On occasion she drops her guard and lets it be known she is death underwater. Will she be stopped in time from committing this dastardly deed? The Sea Lady takes a pretty good subject mermaid turned siren in proper British society and totally drops the ball.

The Secret Places of the Heart

Herbert George Wells

H.G. Wells is best remembered as a central figure in the development of the science fiction genre. However, much of his literary output was more conventional in nature, and he published a number of novels dealing with interpersonal relationships and social themes. H.G. Wells was so charmed by Margaret Sanger that he based The Secret Places of the Heart on his time with her. The novel is a thinly-veiled autobiography that depicts an English gentleman, Sir Richard Hardy, who is attempting to sort out his marital problems while he travels the English countryside in the company of a psychiatrist and much brilliant discussion ranging over the past and future topics of world-wide significance. The Secret Places of the Heart was, in many ways, a love letter from Wells to Sanger... Many critics regard The Secret Places of the Heart as a heavily autobiographical account of one of Wells failed love affairs.

The Shape of Things to Come

Herbert George Wells

The Shape of Things to Come is one of the great classics of science fiction. Originally written in 1929, this masterly work of science fiction has already confirmed H G Wells status as a remarkable soothsayer, and provides glimpses of what is perhaps yet to come. The book is written as a sort of historical account. It tells of how a world state could be considered an answer to Earths problems. After a large plague wipes out much of humanity, a dictatorship takes over, taking away all religion and uniting the world. If someone opposes the dictatorship, they are given a choice to commit suicide in an environment of their choice. However, the dictatorship is later overthrown and the world state dissolves. Spanning the years from 1929 to 2105, it describes future generations and predicts the advent of wars, advancing technology and sweeping cultural changes.

The Sleeper Awakes

Herbert George Wells

This is a short novel about a nineteen century Englishman who falls in a deep sleep only to awake over two hundred years later. The World has changed beyond recognition, and The Sleeper finds himself in a remarkable predicament he has become the owner of the entire planet. However, his awakening profoundly shakes this state of affairs, and he suddenly finds himself at the very center of revolutionary social upheavals and a struggle for the ultimate power. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor, and more than a third of all people are enslaved. This struggle is the main focus of the larger part of the novel. The novel proposes that whatever is done officially for the good of society, individual ambition is unlikely to address the failure of capitalist structures to create a good standard of living for those whose work supports the system.

The Soul of a Bishop

Herbert George Wells

H.G. Wells is an English author best known as a sci-fi writer, though he is also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, but in this 1917 novel, H. G. Wells weaves a more intuitive tale, about a bishop haunted by strange dreams and visions that challenge his faith. Lyrical, poetic, and verging on stream-of-consciousness in places, this little-read work of one of the most enduringly popular writers of modern literature is like found treasure, offering a captivating and unexpected insight into Wells psyche. The Soul of a Bishop tells the story of a spiritual crisis that leads Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester, to give up his diocese in Englands industrial heartland and leave the Anglican Church.

The Time Machine

Herbert George Wells

Decades ahead of his time, H.G. Wells leaps beyond the bounds of conventional imagination to tell the story of the Time Traveler. A seminal and hugely imaginative work of early science fiction, H.G. Wellss The Time Machine is the first and greatest modern portrayal of time-travel and definitely a spiritual ancestor of every time travel story since. The book introduces a scientist who uses a Time Machine to be transferred into the age of a slowly dying earth. Humans have been separated by time, genetics, wars and change of their habitats into two different races, the Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks. After narrowly escaping from the Morlocks, the Time Traveller undertakes another journey even further into the future where he finds the earth growing bitterly cold as the heat and energy of the sun wane. Horrified, he returns to the present, but soon departs again on his final journey. The Time Machine examines the age-old questions of humankinds ultimate destiny and the role we play in shaping it.

The Undying Fire. A Contemporary Novel

Herbert George Wells

Dedicated to all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the world, this re-interpretation of the Book of Job is one of the authors finest discussion novels. Written in 1918, this is the story of Job Huss, the headmaster of a progressive school. It is saturated with the ideas of educational reform and of the teaching of world history as the basis for a common civilization and is one of his most ambitious dialogue narratives. Essentially it is a modernized parody of the book of Job, a prose poem which Wells greatly admired, though not particularly religious, as can be seen from his logical Science Fiction writing. In The Undying Fire, Wells give us an updated Book of Job, focusing on the tribulations of an actual descendant of the biblical Job. The various characters from the Biblical narrative are all there, in updated form.

The War in the Air

Herbert George Wells

Bert Smallways is the unlikely protagonist, a kind of Edwardian Mod, not interested in a steady career, always looking for a good time, riding his proto-scooter down to Brighton at the weekends. When Bert is accidentally scooped up by a German fleet, on its way to launch a surprise attack on the United States, he finds himself with a front row seat to the greatest war that has ever been the war in the air! This new war is to be a different sort of war than all the wars that came before it, unprecedented in its ferocity and destructiveness. The art of war has completely changed with the coming of airplanes, which the author very eloquently brings out. The War in the Air is a story of the awful devastation following a conflict between two first-class powers with the resources of the air at their command. It is one of the most brilliant and successful of Mr. Wellss studies in futurity.