“A Dream of Armageddon”—Wells built a “future history”— a consistent history of the future, in which he set several stories. This tale of a dream of events that have not yet happened, of future war and political and personal disaster, and of death, fits vividly into that history.

“The New Accelerator”—A remarkably joyful story of super speed and mischief. A playful story—for once in a Wells tale the Accelerator is neither lost nor destroyed, nor does it result in madness and death. Instead we end in possibility.

“The Truth About Pyecraft”—In the main, the narrator is indistinguishable from Wells. This is not true of the narrator of “Pyecraft,” who is a thin man, of Indian descent. Pyecraft himself, who thinks he wants to lose weight but actually wants not to be fat, is a real character, in a Bunterish sort of way, a marvelous and memorable “great, fat self-indulgent man.” It’s a genuinely funny fantasy story which leaves us—almost—where it began.

“The Country of the Blind”—For me, one of the most interesting of Wells’s stories, partly because of his need to rewrite the story decades later, or rather, his need to give it a new ending. It’s an unusual story in many ways: in its easy reversal of the common saw that in the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king; in the inability of the protagonist to communicate; in the way that entire concepts become meaningless when the sensory information they carry becomes redundant.

The first iteration of the story (1904, given here) follows the classic Wells short-story pattern of an encounter with the impossible, and an unsatisfactory resolution, the story convincing us by its own awkwardness.

The later version (1939, missing the last three hundred words and with an additional two thousand words) is both more and less satisfactory—the convincing anecdote now becomes a real short story. The pattern is more familiar. Now the sighted man does more than simply escape—his vision gives him the power to return and warn the villagers, Cassandra-like, of their impending doom; the ending contains real love between a man and a woman, and the thrust of the story has changed from reportage to art. Each version of the story is perfectly satisfying, but the immediacy and conviction of the first ending is exchanged for something that demonstrates that, had Wells had the spirit for it, he might in later life have produced some remarkably moving short stories of the fantastic. (It was not that he was not asked, nor that he did not have a market. More that the fecundity of ideas went away, and that his mind and attention went elsewhere. As Wells explained, in apology, “I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production.”)