I said none of those things back then, and I wished that I had. I’ve said them now, to you. Trust the tale, not the teller, as Stephen King reminded us. The best of Rudyard Kipling’s tales are, simply, in the first rank of stories written in the English language. Enjoy them.

This is the introduction to Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy, edited by Stephen Jones, 2008.

From the Days of Future Past: The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, by H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells, Bertie to his parents and H. G. to his friends, was, with Jules Verne, the person who gave us the scientific romance—the forerunner of that branch of literature we now know as science fiction. His short stories, and his proto-science fiction novels, have lasted and are still read today, while many of the mainstream novels he considered more important and significant are gone and, for the most part, forgotten, perhaps because the novels were very much of their time, and swallowed by the change in time, while some of the science fiction and fantasy novels and tales are, for all their late Victorian or Edwardian settings, quite timeless.

Wells’s novels set a pattern. The madman on his island making people out of animals, the journey through time or into space, all have been imitated, consciously or unconsciously, ever since, taken as templates for stories by hundreds, perhaps thousands of other authors: the arrival in a small Sussex village of an Invisible Man—his self-imposed confinement to his room, the brilliant but forgettable hero barely introduced until we are past the hundredth page, the revelation and explanation of poor, mad albino Griffin, is not just the story of The Invisible Man, but it is the shape, the recipe for a thousand other stories in which there are Some Things Mankind Was Not Meant to Know, in which the borders between science and madness are frayed. Wells’s science fiction books are novels of ideas as much as they are novels of people; while arguably they are also all novels of class, either metaphorically (as Dr. Moreau creates an underclass of beast-men in The Island of Dr. Moreau; or The Time Machine’s Traveler encounters in the distant future an effete upper class and a monstrous lower class) or literally—crazy Griffin is a lower-middle-class creature out of his depth.

The short stories, for the most part, tend to be something else. Something unique to Wells.

It has been said that the Golden Age of science fiction is when you were twelve years old, and it could certainly be argued that Wells wrote his short stories for twelve-year-olds, or for the twelve-year-olds inside adults. His fabulism tends to be asexual, unproblematic, straightforward. (A personal admission: I read most of these stories first as an eleven-year-old boy. I found a thick, red-covered collection of The Science Fiction Short Stories of H. G. Wells on a shelf in a schoolroom and read it several times over the next two years, fascinated and transported. The tales were old, undoubtedly, but they did not feel dusty or anachronistic or even outdated. The flowering of the strange orchid disturbed me and the unsatisfactory nature of the Magic Shop left me wondering. It was good.)