‘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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Review: ‘The Hammerpond Park Burglary’ by H. G. Wells
‘The Hammerpond Park Burglary’ is not one of the best-known short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), but in my determination to read all of his short fiction I thought it worth recording my comments on this slight piece of fiction, even though it has no elements of fantasy or science fiction and is more like a Raffles adventure than a quintessential slice of H. G. Wells’s imaginative fiction.
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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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‘A Deal in Ostriches’ is a short tale by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), originally published on 20 December 1894 in the Pall Mall Gazette before being republished in Wells’s first short-story collection, The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, a year later.
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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 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 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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‘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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Verde Omark's Classic Fantasy Stories 