And that suggestion holds as true now as when he wrote it.

(THE READER IS advised that some plot details are given away in this section.)

‘The Lord of the Dynamos”—Here we meet the New Theology, in a tale of “a blackleg, and Azuma-zi, who was a mere black.” Azuma-zi, come to England from the East, sees the Dynamo as “greater and calmer even than the Buddhas he had seen at Rangoon.” A reminder of attitudes and language we would no longer view as reasonable, and a story that presaged one of the themes of science fiction; that our machines, if we permit them, can become our gods.

“The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes”—An example of Wells’s technique of presenting the reader with an impossibility and then buttressing it with just enough detail to convince.

“The Moth”—Science fiction in that it is a fiction about scientists, but it takes on the mantle of a ghost story and then, in its view of the descent into madness, shades gently into the weird tale. As our scientist accepts that only he can see the moth he embraces his madness, and that is true horror.

“A Catastrophe”—A heartbreakingly biographical story, but one that gives a happy ending to a world that in Wells’s own life ended in disaster. A what-if story. In reality Wells’s father lost his shop, his mother went into service. Here is fiction as time-travel, a way to fix the unfixable.

“The Cone”—A small, tragic, eternal triangle (a cone is a triangle in three dimensions). Reminiscent of the tales of horror and revenge told in the American EC Comics line in the 1950s, in which a metaphor is taken literally and lethally: blood boils in the veins of both the artist and the cuckolded husband, and in the case of one of them it is not merely a figure of speech. With its machinery dominating the landscape, the story reminds us of “Lord of the Dynamos,” and the end can be seen as a similar act of sacrifice.

“The Argonauts of the Air”—A small piece of science fiction, now consigned forever to an alternate past. A fascinating little story in which Wells’s every guess and instinct was wrong, save for his understanding that mankind would be traveling by air, and sooner than most people believed. Despite the death at the end of the story, this is not shaped as a tragedy. This could be a space flight story, a little too early. While Wells was wrong about the early days of heavier-than-air flight—it wasn’t a millionaire’s game, but a relatively cheap playing field—he would have been right about space travel, which is a billionaire’s game of the kind where one can imagine the gilding of aluminum.

“Under the Knife”—A death that crosses the universe, in a story that is predicated upon changes in scale, as we gaze upon the handiwork, and the hand (although not the face), of God.

“A Slip Under the Microscope”—SF in the sense that it is a fiction with scientists in it; a fiction that reminds us of Wells’s own early failure to graduate. Again, in every sense, a tale of class. Again, a tale of rivalry, here played out as a morality play in which success and failure mean two very different things to two very different people.