Bøker av H. G. Wells

H.G, Wells' timeless story of arrogance and monstrosity caused consternation when it was first released. Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote Pacific island with only a drunk and a disgraced scientist for company - and a whole, subhuman community of monsters spliced together from the bodies of exotic animals. Prendick must find a way through this madness and find his way back to civilisation - or die trying, This gripping novel from science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells challenges readers with profound and unsettling questions: are there limits to our ambition? Do we dare meddle with life itself? And what (if anything) sets us apart from the animals? This edition contains two bonus unsettling stories from 'the realist of the fantastic'. The Door in the Wall crashes reality headlong into imagination, and A Dream of Armageddon sets out a grim future vision of dark portents and impossible choices.

The narrator tells of witnessing the unstoppable onslaught of invaders from Mars, leading toward the seemingly inevitable downfall of mankind in this landmark of the literary imagination and foundational novel of the science fiction genre.First published in 1897 and never out of print since, The War of the Worlds is told in a lucid, almost documentary, style. The realistically depicted setting, with cities and streets accurately described, gives the Martian attack, and the subsequent collapse of order in Victorian England, unforgettable impact. The British Empire brings its mightiest war machines to bear to no avail as the fleeing narrator is reduced to hiding in the ruins of civilization while being stalked by an inhuman enemy. Adapted repeatedly to film and television, the novel's central concept of humanity under attack by extraterrestrials has never ceased resonating in pop culture and may have inspired more imitations than any other trope in the science fiction genre. It is a tribute to the capacious imagination of H.G. Wells that this novel retains both a sense of otherworldly wonder and a harrowing intensity to this day.Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

"The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge." One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with her there and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

Anyone could say of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say "Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralyzing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered and wanted to go indoors . . . It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writer that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions. But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary, and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. -- From Wells's introduction to THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND AND OTHER STORIES.

The biological truth Wells has given us would slow down an alien encounters on Star Trek or Farscape, where intrepid adventurers rarely worry about local languages, much less breathing the local air. The aliens have invaded because they have a fondness for human blood, sucked from living beings (how they discovered they had a taste for us is unclear, but it makes dramatic theater, anyway). If you haven't read Wells, you need to; Wells created a landmark -- he is a thoughtful social commentator, a pioneer of what makes SF intellectually appealing, and a damned fine storyteller, too.The novel is the first-person narrative of both an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and of his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians.

Twelve Stories and a Dream -- "A Dream of Armageddon": "That book," he repeated, pointing a lean finger, "is about dreams. Dreams tell you nothing." I did not catch his meaning for a second. "They don't know," he added. I looked a little more attentively at his face. "There are dreams," he said, "and dreams."

A century ago, H.G. Wells was one of the men who all but created the science fiction novel. Wells wrote three classics in four years: The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). The Invisible Man, owes an obvious debt to Frankenstein, as it explores the nature of mankind, asking weather an invisible man still be bound by the morality that seems natural to us. Seems like a natural thing, doesn't it? But listen to the story Wells tells, and the doubt he places on a thing seemingly obvious: A researcher working (more or less) as a graduate student in physics, discovers a treatment that will make himself invisible. Griffin -- our invisible man -- may well be morally bankrupt before he takes the treatment. He begins by making himself invisible to avoid paying his rent -- and, as he sneaks out of the building, he sets it afire as a "lesson" for his landlord. He steals money entrusted to his father -- and causes his father to suicide in shame . . . but that's only the beginning . . .

In a novel written on the eve of World War I, H. G. Wells imagines a war “to end all wars” that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia.Writing in 1913, on the eve of World War I’s mass slaughter and long before World War II’s mushroom cloud finale, H. G. Wells imagined a war that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in a utopia of enlightened world government. Set in the 1950s, Wells’s neglected novel The World Set Free describes a conflict so horrific that it actually is the war that ends war.  Wells—the first to imagine a “uranium-based bomb”—offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years: “Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond.” Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time, Wells foresees both a world powered by clean, plentiful atomic energy—and the destructive force of the neutron chain reaction. With a cast of characters including Marcus Karenin, the moral center of the narrative; Firmin, a proto-Brexiteer; and Egbert, the visionary young British monarch, Wells dramatizes a world struggling for sanity. Wells’s supposedly happy ending—a planetary government presided over by European men—may not appeal to contemporary readers, but his anguish at the world’s self-destructive tendencies will strike a chord. Sarah Cole is the author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and The Twentieth Century (2019). The Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University, she is the cofounder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar and founder of the Humanities War and Peace Initiative at Columbia. She is also the author of Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (2003) and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (2012). Joshua Glenn, who was the first to describe the years 1900–1935 as science fiction’s “Radium Age,” has helped popularize stories from the era for over a decade now. A former Boston Globe staffer and publisher of the indie intellectual journal Hermenaut, he is coauthor of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), Significant Objects (2012), and the family activities guide UNBORED (2012). He is also cofounder of the brand consultancy Semiovox; and he publishes the blogHiLobrow. 

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

H. G. Wells' classic science-fiction novel about a man who's turned himself invisible.

The Time Machine When the Time Traveller courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700—and everything had changed. In this unfamiliar, utopian age creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony. The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvelous beings—unearth their secret and then return to his own time—until he discovered that his invention, his only avenue of escape, had been stolen. H. G. Wells’s famous novel of one man’s astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination first appeared in 1895. It won him immediate recognition and has been regarded ever since as one of the great masterpieces in the literature of science fiction. The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells’s science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets, is still startling and vivid nearly a century after its appearance, and a half century after Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio adaptation. This daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust, and chaos, is central to the career of H. G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of “vast and cool and unsympathetic” scientific powers spinning out of control was a crucial theme throughout his work. Visionary, shocking, and chilling, The War of the Worlds has lost none of its impact since its first publication in 1898.

A scientist whose experiments have rendered him invisible veers into madness when he cannot change back in this thrilling and influential cornerstone of science fiction.A mysterious visitor to an inn, bundled up from head to toe and with his face covered in bandages, draws the attention and gossip of locals, but their wildest speculations come nowhere near the bizarre truth. This is the rogue scientist Griffin, who has made himself invisible and will shortly learn he can¿t return to normal. Brilliant, unhinged and full of undirected rage at his fate, what outrageous crimes might an invisible man commit? The Invisible Man first appeared in 1897 and has resonated in pop culture ever since, with its title character portrayed as both hero and villain in film, television and graphic novels. The author¿s most celebrated contributions to the fledgling literature of science fiction, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, appeared over the course of less than five years and mark an extraordinary outpouring of the imagination.With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Invisible Man is both modern and readable.

The narrator tells of witnessing the unstoppable onslaught of invaders from Mars, leading toward the seemingly inevitable downfall of mankind in this landmark of the literary imagination and foundational novel of the science fiction genre. First published in 1897 and never out of print since, The War of the Worlds is told in a lucid, almost documentary, style. The realistically depicted setting, with cities and streets accurately described, gives the Martian attack, and the subsequent collapse of order in Victorian England, unforgettable impact. The British Empire brings its mightiest war machines to bear to no avail as the fleeing narrator is reduced to hiding in the ruins of civilization while being stalked by an inhuman enemy. Adapted repeatedly to film and television, the novel's central concept of humanity under attack by extraterrestrials has never ceased resonating in pop culture and may have inspired more imitations than any other trope in the science fiction genre. It is a tribute to the capacious imagination of H.G. Wells that this novel retains both a sense of otherworldly wonder and a harrowing intensity to this day. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The War of the Worlds is both modern and readable.

Wild Boy has been covered in hair since birth and condemned to life in a travelling freak show. Excluded from society, he takes refuge in watching people at the fair - and develops a talent for observation and detection. But when there's a murder, suspicion turns to Wild Boy, so he and the feisty acrobat Clarissa Everett find themselves on the run...