‘The Stolen Bacillus’ is an 1894 short story by the British writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Between the mid-1890s and the mid-1900s, Wells wrote much of his best work, with a strong commitment to storytelling perfectly wedded to interesting ideas and theories.
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‘The Beautiful Suit’, a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), has the air of a fairy tale about it. Indeed, when it was first published in Collier’s Weekly in April 1909, the story bore the title ‘A Moonlight Fable’.
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‘The Diamond Maker’ is an 1894 short story by the British science-fiction author H. G. Wells (1866-1946). In the story, a narrator tells of his encounter with a man who claimed to have made diamonds artificially. Like many of Wells’s greatest works of fiction, this is a story in which the seemingly impossible – at least by late Victorian standards – becomes possible.
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‘The Jilting of Jane’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). It’s included in his Complete Short Stories, although according to the Wells scholar J. R. Hammond, its publishing history is somewhat sketchy: he tells us it was ‘first published circa 1894’, although where it appeared has apparently been lost in the mists of time.
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The influence of H. G. Wells (1866-1946) on science fiction goes without saying. Brian Aldiss, in Trillion Year Spree, call him the Shakespeare of science fiction, acknowledging his role in raising the emerging genre to an art form. The tales of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are familiar to millions of people, even those who have never read Wells’s books, thanks to notable film adaptations.
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‘The Purple Pileus’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in Black and White at Christmas 1896. The story tells of a man who eats a purple fungus – the ‘purple pileus’ of the story’s title – and becomes intoxicated. This experience alters the whole course of his life.
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‘The Treasure in the Forest’ is a short story by the British science-fiction author H. G. Wells (1866-1946). It was first published on 23 August 1894 in the Pall Mall Budget before being included (as the final story) in his 1895 collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents.
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Of all of the short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), ‘The Apple’ is perhaps the most allegorical. First published in the Idler magazine in October 1896, the story concerns a schoolmaster who meets a man on a train; this man gives the teacher an apple which is from the Tree of Knowledge.
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‘The Moth’ is a short story by the British author H. G. Wells (1866-1946), published in his 1895 collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. The tale might be regarded as a variation on the ‘ambiguous ghost story’ in that we as readers cannot be sure whether the moth in the story is the ghost of the protagonist’s old rival come back to haunt him, or a hallucination which exists only in his overworked brain.
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‘In the Abyss’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in Pearson’s Magazine in August 1896. The tale is one of Wells’s fabulous voyages, which sees an intrepid inventor travel down to the ocean bed to observe the marine creatures found living there.
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Verde Omark's Classic Fantasy Stories 