Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

Le Guin's selection of twenty-six stories showcases Well's genius and reintroduces readers to his singular talent for making the unbelievable seem utterly plausible.

H. G. Wells was born Herbert George in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometimes shopkeeper, his mother a former lady's maid. Although "Bertie" left school at fourteen to become a draper's apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher's salary. His other "scientific romances"—The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908)—won him the distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me."

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929. She is the bestselling author of the Earthsea Cycle and the Hainish Cycle, including The Left Hand of Darkness. With the awarding of the 1975 Hugo and Nebula Awards to The Dispossessed, she became the first author to win both awards twice for novels. Le Guin lives in Portland, Oregon.