Scientific discoveries, strange encounters, and the consequences of power.
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was an English novelist, short story writer, and social critic. He studied biology under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science in London and worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. His early novels include The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He also wrote widely about history, science, and social reform.
His short fiction includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and satire. In “The Country of the Blind,” a mountaineer reaches an isolated community whose inhabitants are all blind. “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” follows a clerk who discovers that he can make things happen by willing them. Wells describes extraordinary events through practical details and familiar social situations. His characters often discover that an unusual ability or a scientific advance creates problems they did not foresee.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
A father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
A physiologist’s new stimulant speeds thought and movement so radically that the outside world seems frozen in time.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
A failing shopkeeper finally tells his wife they face ruin, just as a family catastrophe offers an answer neither can admit wanting.
When an ostrich supposedly swallows a priceless diamond aboard ship, five ordinary birds become the stakes in an escalating auction.
A stranger on a train recounts a second life in a future world, where love and private happiness stand against an approaching global war.
A poor scholarship student makes one accidental movement during an exam and must decide whether winning matters more than his principles.
At the Last Judgment, tyrants, saints, and ordinary souls learn that divine scrutiny exposes more than public sins.
A stranded collector hatches an extinct giant bird on a lonely atoll and gains a companion that keeps growing.
The timid inventor of a working flying machine becomes a public hero—and discovers that everyone expects him to risk the first flight.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
Alone in a remote Borneo observatory, an astronomer discovers that the darkness inside the dome holds a threat far closer than the stars.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
On a carefully cultivated tour of Rome, a refined schoolteacher meets an ideal companion—until one social detail tests her affection.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A mild schoolmaster tests his courage with a harmless mock burglary and stumbles into a real criminal escape.
A village shop assistant returns from three missing weeks with ashes in his pockets and a love he cannot explain or forget.
After crossing a feared secret society, an arrogant colonial traveler finds that revenge follows him from Sierra Leone to London.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
After five years and most of his fortune, Monson must decide whether his flying machine is ready—or whether ridicule has forced the decision.
A young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
An ironmaster invites his wife’s lover on a midnight tour of the furnaces, where every display of heat carries a threat.
A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A successful politician confides that a green door has offered him glimpses of a lost garden of perfect happiness throughout his life.
A Brazilian gunboat sent against a plague of giant ants discovers an organized enemy capable of challenging human rule of the Amazon.
A quiet orchid collector longs for one remarkable event, then a mysterious plant from the tropics begins to bloom in his greenhouse.
A colonial patrol trapped on a cliff must escape enemy fire, thirst, and a drop that seems impossible to survive.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A housemaid watches her respectable fiancé rise in the world—and begin to treat their long engagement as something beneath him.
A confident rural army meets an enemy weapon built to cross trenches, resist rifles, and turn courage into a tactical liability.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
A stubborn skeptic discovers that any command he truly wills becomes real, though precision is not among his gifts.
After his rival dies, a celebrated entomologist discovers a moth no one else can see—and cannot stop trying to catch it.
A shy novice becomes a theater critic and finds the stage’s poses and speeches steadily replacing his own personality.
A grieving prince builds an ever more magnificent monument to his lost queen, refining it until devotion and art become hard to separate.
A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
A confident skeptic spends the night in a notorious room, armed with candles and reason against its dark reputation.
A laboratory accident blinds Davidson to London and replaces it with a vivid view of a remote island that may be more than hallucination.
A seaside walker discovers that unfamiliar deep-sea creatures have reached the English coast—and have developed a taste for human prey.
A new star grows brighter each night, and one mathematician realizes that its path will bring catastrophe to Earth.
A nervous visitor steals a scientist’s deadliest culture and races across London with catastrophe—and fame—on his mind.
A London psychical researcher leaves his body during an experiment—and returns to find it occupied by something else.
A confident clubman claims he helped a hapless ghost vanish, then agrees to demonstrate the spirit’s strange hand gestures.
A poor medical student accepts an old philosopher’s inheritance offer and wakes to find that far more than a name has changed hands.
A mediocre painter watches his portrait acquire a devilish expression—and then hears the canvas criticize his art.
Two exhausted adventurers follow a stolen treasure map into a tropical forest, certain that murder has put a fortune within reach.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
An obese clubman demands an old family remedy for losing weight, only to discover how literally the recipe works.
Three horsemen pursuing a fleeing woman enter a silent valley where the wind carries vast webs alive with spiders.
Confined to a couch, an invalid watches a distant manhunt as entertainment until the chase crosses the river and comes to his window.
A man awaiting surgery confronts death, consciousness, and the scale of the universe while his doctors work.
