Showing results by author "H. G. Wells" in All Categories

The War of the Worlds has been both popular and influential. It has never gone out of print. It has spawned half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, various comic book adaptations, a television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It has even influenced the work of scientists. It is one of the earliest stories that details a conflict between mankind and an alien race.

Written at the turn of the 19th century, before "science fiction" existed as a genre, H.G. Wells' creation was a new departure in literature. The author's deep devotion to social reform led him to use the idea of an extraterrestrial invasion to theorize about a possible violent upheaval in society - instead of "Martians" think "Bolsheviks."

H. G. Wells was known as the father of science fiction, but his creative genius encompassed far more that a single literary genre. He was also a visionary, a satirist, a sociologist and an historian. This third audio anthology of H. G. Wells’ Short Stories produced by Raconteurs Audio in collaboration with Spoken Realms, brings together some his lesser known short stories.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer, now best remembered for his science fiction novels and often credited as being the father of science fiction. 'The Country of the Blind' is the strange story of a mountain guide who accidently falls off a cliff ledge in the Andes. He survives the fall unhurt, and finds himself in a remote valley where a tribe lives completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Simple magic tricks are what a little boy is looking for when he drags his father into a quaint, old shop. The proprietor seems to be a master of illusion - a genius at slight of hand. But, as the son becomes mesmerized, the father feels an icy hand grip his heart.

The shipwrecked Edward Prendick is rescued by the passing ship Ipecacuanha, which is carrying a cargo of animals. On board he comes across Montgomery, who appears to have a grotesque servant named M'ling. They are put ashore onto an island that is owned by Dr. Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist, who is known for his infamous experiments in vivisection.

Hailed for over a century as one of the finest science fiction stories of all time, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is a classic story of adventure, exploration, and scientific curiosity. The Time Machine relates the story of the Time Traveller, a Victorian inventor who creates a machine that allows him to travel to any time period. He chooses to rocket forward into the unknown world of the future, landing in the year 802,701 where he encounters the humanoids descendants of Earth, the seemigly friendly and benign Eloi, and the subterranean and primitive Morlocks.

Englishman Edward Prendick finds himself shipwrecked on the open ocean. When a passing ship takes him aboard and revives him, things are starting to look less gloomy for the young scientist. Yet little does he know things about to get much worse. He is taken to an abandoned island occupied only by Dr. Moreau, a disgraced English scientist for his unethical treatment of live creatures. Prendick finds that the Doctor has been up to old habits, using the island's animals to create animal-human hybrids.

The St. Charles Players present a unique telling of H.G. Wells' classic futuristic adventure, in a new multi-cast dramatization performed in exciting Radio Theatre style.

First published in 1905, H. G. Wells’s Kipps is an appraisal of society and class framed in a “rags to riches” style plot.

At 21, the passionate and headstrong Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to rule her own life. When her autocratic father forbids her, via formal letter, from attending a fashionable art-school ball, and even further refuses to allow her advanced study of science, she decides she has no choice but to leave her family home and make a fresh start alone. She escapes the stodgy suburbs to London, enrolling as a student of biology and immersing herself in a world of intellectuals, socialists, and suffragettes.

This 1911 collection of thirty-three stories, selected and revised by the author from amongst his huge output of short fiction, includes tales of comedy, horror, monsters, and strange worlds. In his Introduction, Wells writes that the book brings together, “All the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again,” and that, “No short story of mine of the slightest merit is excluded from this volume.”

Out for a walk in London one day, Gip and his father happen upon a magic shop. At Gip's urging, the two go in — and things grow more and more curious by the minute. Counters, store fixtures, and mirrors seem to move around the room, and the shopkeeper is most mysterious of all. Gip is thrilled by all he sees, and his father is at first amused, but when things become stranger and sinister father is no longer sure where reality ends and illusion begins.

In this famous fantasy story, a mountain climber falls into a strange and isolated society of non-seeing persons - claiming to have been in existence for 15 generations and cut off from the rest of the world by an earthquake. The interloper decides quickly that "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". However, things turn out very differently than he had planned.

The Star is an 1897 apocalyptic short story by H. G. Wells. Here is an impressive story based on the inter-action of planetary bodies and of the sun upon them. A great star is seen approaching the earth. At first it is only an object of interest to the general public, but there is an astronomer on the earth, who is watching each phase and making mathematical calculations, for he knows the intimate relation of gravitation between bodies and the effect on rotating bodies of the same force from an outside source. He fears all sorts of wreckage on our earth.

In his fiction, HG Wells explored various fantasy and science fiction sub-genres, from alien invasion narratives through time travel to dystopian tales. He was also an innovator and pioneer in matters of plot and style, as proven by the 33 short stories in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. The tale of the title is about a mountaineer who discovers a secluded valley of blind people. When he tries to tell them about the sense of sight, they scoff and attribute it to an over-active imagination.

An anthology of chilling, classic horror stories, including "The Tale-Tell Heart", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving; "The Hand", "Was it a Dream?", and "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant; "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells; "Moon-Face" by Jack London; "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

A young boy unlocks a world of joy and imagination. But when he returns the next day, he finds the door is not there. It has moved. How can a door move? And what is the real meaning of "The Door in the Wall"?

An English scientist, known only as the Time Traveler, constructs a machine that allows him to move back and forth through different periods of time. Testing this machine, the man travels forward to AD 802,701. Here he discovers a lazy, undisciplined group of people who do not seem interested in anything. Thinking he has seen all he needs for his research, he decides to travel back home. Upon returning to where he left his time machine, he discovers an intelligent, violent group of people called the Morlocks have stolen it.

This classic 19th Century science fiction novel by H.G. Wells tells the story of a scientist who builds a machine that can travel through time. The scientist details his travels into a radically changed and surprisingly dystopian future for humanity. When he appears to find himself stranded in this unfamiliar place and time among the gentle Eloi, will he be able to find his way back, or rather will he fall victim to the disturbing Morlocks?