“The Plattner Story”—again, an anecdote, in which we find ourselves convinced of its truth by the initial shock of the reversal of right-and-left-handedness of things, as if Plattner has been mapped through another dimension and returned to us in mirror-form (the branch of chemistry known as chirality). We see ghosts and a nine days’ wonder (there are many nine days’ wonders in Wells’s tales—Here, we are told in one way or another, several times, as the stories begin, is something remarkable—something that has already been replaced in the imagination of the populace, and now I shall tell you something about it you did not know).

“The Story of the late Mr. Elvesham”—A body swap tale, as poor Eden is subsumed into the mysterious Mr. Elvesham. It’s proto-SF that shades into pure horror.

“In the Abyss”—Again, a fragmentary, almost anecdotal piece, in which we gain a glimpse of a world deep beneath our own, and lose it once more.

“The Sea Raiders”—A tale I last read when I was twelve or thirteen. I remember the fear I felt then at the incursion of something deeply alien and dangerous in places I knew and was familiar with. Another battle in the War of the Worlds, although the threat comes from below, not from Mars. The style is journalistic, the intent purely to convince. The inconclusive nature of the ending adds to the feeling that this happened, or could have happened, just as Wells describes.

“The Crystal Egg”—The nature of seeing is a theme that echoes through many of Wells’s short stories and here (as in “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes”) we encounter seeing at a distance. Once more a revelation that is only partially revealed, wrapped in a series of mysteries and, eventually, lost due to human fallibility, not malevolence. The glimpse of another world the tale (and the Egg) gives us is otherworldly and haunting, and poor Cave, the small businessman on the edge, sustained by his visions of another world, is a perfectly Wellsian character, giving an odd humanity to what would otherwise be an anecdote about an interplanetary television before its time.

“A Story of the Stone Age”—Now an almost forgotten story, it feels like an aborted novel, one that should have continued. Wells is an early explorer of a genre that others have returned to over the years—that of conceptual breakthrough in Stone Age man, in a time when all ideas are new. The hero becomes the first man to ride a horse, and he creates an early doomsday weapon, a club inset with lion’s teeth. While the story he gives us is satisfying, it still reads like something Wells meant to go back to and complete, a book that would have been the Clan of the Cave Bear of its day.

“The Star”—Wells enjoys changing scale, the slow pull back from the personal to the cosmic, and employs the technique here to great effect.

“The Man Who Could Work Miracles”—Justly famous, often dramatized—this story has been a film, and adapted many times for television and radio. Like many of Wells’s fantasies, it loops back to where it began.