These are tales of obsession and revelation and discovery. Some of them swash, sometimes, buckle and adventure. Mostly, however, they remind us that they are, in some sense, eyewitness reports, with all the limitations and power of such. We are told repeatedly what was seen, and only a little more, and left to draw our own inferences. We are left to wonder. Was a man translated through the fourth dimension, and did he see hungry spirit-creatures there? Was that what he truly saw? Did man-eating cephalopods come ashore on stolid British beaches, to feast on human flesh? What was seen worshipping in the depths of the ocean abyss? How did the crystal egg arrive in the shop, and where is it now? We know only what was seen, and that, in its way, is convincing.

There is an old saw that in a short story one thing happens. Wells’s short stories exemplify this. His writing is effective: as good as it needs to be, with little in the way of grace notes. Still, the best of them are haunting in their implications.

All too often they are tales of failed revelation. In Wells’s world the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not eaten—not because of fear or difficulty, but because of embarrassment—and over and again knowledge or something equally as magical (the secret of making diamonds, an egg that shows us life on Mars, the formula for invisibility) is lost to the world. At the end of many of these stories the world is unchanged, and yet it could have been changed utterly and irrevocably. If one of the social functions of science fiction is to prepare us for change, Wells’s stories began that process. Darwin adumbrated change. Wells was a scientist or at least, when young, a science teacher and science writer, taught by a disciple of Darwin’s, and he was not scared by ideas or by the practicalities of science. Wells used his fiction to illuminate change, celebrating it as he warned of what change could mean.

The most successful Wells short stories are not what we today would view as stories, not really. They are anecdotes and journalism: carnivorous squid arrive in a tale that feels like an article from a turn-of-the-century scientific paper, while the ants, armed with poison, conclude their tale fifty years away from arriving in Europe (in those slow, comfortable days before container ship and jet plane). It’s not a weakness—indeed, it’s where these stories derive a significant amount of their power and effect from, and it’s one of the places that these stories can be seen as early branches on the science fiction family tree: part of SF is the literature of ideas, and several of these stories are almost pure idea, uncluttered by plot or narrative. Still, by today’s standards (and those of the time Wells was writing) this was not on. They were not proper short stories—a criticism that Wells took to heart in his 1911 introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, when he says,