‘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’.

‘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.

‘The Temptation of Harringay’ is a short story by the British author H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in the 9 February 1895 issue of the St. James’s Gazette and subsequently reprinted in The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895). It tells of an artist, Harringay, who paints a man’s head that comes to life and criticises his work.

Science fiction has reinvented the Robinsonade – a narrative based on the scenario described in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – on numerous occasions and in a variety of ways. We’ve had individuals stranded on a whole planet rather than a mere island (a scenario used, in recent times, as the basis for Andy Weir’s The Martian), and we’ve had individuals stranded on traffic islands in the middle of a busy city (see J. G. Ballard’s 1974 masterpiece Concrete Island).

‘The Lord of the Dynamos’ is a short story by the British science-fiction author H. G. Wells (1866-1946). It first appeared in the Pall Mall Budget in September 1894, and describes a worker on the London Underground who worships one of the electric dynamos powering the trains at Camberwell.