‘The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham’ was first published in May 1896 in the Idler magazine. It’s one of the best stories of H. G. Wells (1866-1946), who left behind dozens of classic short tales which laid the foundations for modern science fiction.
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Review: ‘The Land Ironclads’ by H. G. Wells
‘The Land Ironclads’ is one of the most prophetic short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), a writer who made more than his fair share of accurate prophecies. First published in Strand magazine in December 1903, the story anticipated the invention of the tank in modern warfare some thirteen years before the first tanks were deployed.
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‘Motel Architecture’ is not one of the best-known short stories of the British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), but it’s one of his most prescient. And this is an author who anticipated everything from Ronald Reagan becoming US President (in the late 1960s) to videocalls and virtual socialising via a TV/computer screen (see his ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ for the latter).
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‘The Electric Ant’ is a short story by the American writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82), written in 1968 and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October the following year. The story is about an ‘electric ant’ or robot which has always thought it was human; when it discovers the truth, it sets about trying to alter the reality around it.
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‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in the Pall Mall Budget on 2 August 1894. In some ways a forerunner to later narratives like Little Shop of Horrors, the story is an unsettling tale about a parasitical species of plant which feeds upon the blood of a man who collects orchids.
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‘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 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 