So I’ll keep it general, and assume that Wells’s name speaks for itself. There are way too many stories for me to go through them one by one, and I must admit that the quality was sort of uneven – some had aged much better than others, some were clearly prototypes of different kinds of stories, and they covered such a variety of sci fi and adventure that no reader will probably be equally pleased by all of them. He names places and talks about people like you know them and in general it’s easy to slip in and settle down with your suspension of disbelief left neatly hung up by the door. What’s most surprising is perhaps how easily I accepted this odd mode of storytelling (though I guess it’s not for everyone, judging by the cover graffiti) – Wells always does his best to make his stories seem real, and maybe this impartial or friend-of-a-friend narrator helps the illusion. The first and possibly most famous example being, of course, The Time Machine. Wells writes with the manic imagination of someone who writes short stories to put bread on the table, picking up fantastical ideas from everywhere and exploring them all.Ī surprising amount of his stories are told in the format of a narrator telling the reader a story that the actual protagonist told the narrator himself. There are a lot of short stories in here, covering a whole spectrum of speculation. Still, it’s pretty old, so maybe it changed hands a few times since that judgement was passed? Or maybe it was already old when it unimpressed that reader? On the front cover someone’s added “+ very boring” after “Short” and done a bit of maths on the inside of the back cover. Spuggy picked it up in Belfast, a dog-eared (I won’t say “beloved”) old copy from Oxfam and I picked it up right at the end of our holiday to tide me over till we got home.
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