Classics Considered

It's been about fifteen years since I first read The Time Machine .  It was so unlike anything I'd read before.  Afterwards, I even wrote my own time-travelling story, which was more like fan-fiction than anything else. I don't often reread books, but as I build my H. G. Wells collection, I figured I'd reread each book and see how it held up over time.  (No pun intended!)  The Time Machine was the first book by Wells I'd read and seemed like a natural starting point. The story begins in Victorian England.  A group of friends - a doctor, a journalist, a psychologist, and others - gather at the Time Traveller's house for their customary meal and conversation.  The Time Traveller at this stage has just created a model of his machine which he says he can build at full-scale and use to travel through time.  The demonstration leaves his guests skeptical, but not long after that, the Time Traveller shows up to one of his own dinners, bedraggled and te...

It's October again: that time of year when you reach for a chunky sweater, a spicy latte, and, of course, a spooky book to read. In this episode, I share nine of my favorite Victorian short stories by authors such as Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells.  You probably don't want to read these at night...

Lately I've been wandering down memory lane with H. G. Wells' The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911).  This collection holds, in the words of Wells: "all of the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again."  Some are new and some familiar - two of them are personal favorites, which I'll be mentioning in Monday's podcast episode ("Nine Creepy Victorian Short Stories"). In the Introduction, Wells gives us a little recap of the short story form and its writers, as far as it had evolved in the late Victorian era.  He praises Kipling, whose writing "opened like window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East."  J. M. Barrie also gets a mention, along with Henry James, Stephen Crane, Jerome K. Jerome, and Edith Nesbit.  Other contemporaries are listed, whose names are less known to modern readers.  Joseph Conrad alone is noted as having, in Wells's eyes, continued in the 20th century...

A magazine article provoked me to re-read H. G. Well's sci-fi horror classic, The Island of Doctor Moreau. Join my trip back in time as I talk about a Soviet scientist, a British author, and human-chimpanzee people . Sources / Further Reading: "It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids" by David Barash Articles referencing Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov: Smithsonian Magazine Laboratory Primate Newsletter (Brown University) Wikipedia discussion H. G. Wells's The New World Order H. G. Wells vs. George Orwell ( The Conversation ) "The Comprachicos" by John Kaiser (JSTOR) "Wanting Babies Like Themselves, Some Parents Choose Genetic Defects" ( New York Times )

Previously there occurred to me an idea for a post (since scrapped), called something like "H.G. Wells, Master of Humor and Pathos."  The gist of it, which I saw again in The First Men in the Moon *, is his unique knack for combining both emotions to pull you into the scientific-adventure plots.  Though having enjoyed his other best-known novels, I had middling hopes for this one (perhaps guided by the bias that it was not included in my hardback anthology, but never mind that ).  Turned out to be every bit as good. If Cavor is the model mad scientist, then Bedford is the archetypical starving writer, whose moment of inspiration is abruptly disturbed by Cavor's customary stroll by his house.  An unexpected collaboration on creating the scientist's Cavorite (a sort of anti-gravity substance) sends them literally to the moon.  The moon, contrary to Cavor's expectations, is not uninhabited.  This sets the two inventors at odds with each other, since Cavor is q...