The Crystal Egg & Other Stories

With an Introduction and Notes by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.

This volume contains a generous selection of the tales of H. G. Wells, some of them famous, some forgotten. They demonstrate his immense imaginative energy, his originality, his prophetic genius, and his mastery of a range embracing Gothic horror, social satire, lyrical reverie and Utopian fantasy. Here Wells predicts the use of the tank, the aeroplane, the parachute and the bathysphere; he depicts the arrival of monsters from the deep, and envisages the destruction of life on our planet. Nevertheless, in social comedy, Wells anticipates E. M. Forster. We also see why Wells proved to be a provocation and inspiration not only to numerous science-fiction writers but also to such eminent authors as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and William Golding. Entertaining, disturbing, astonishing and thought-provoking, these tales constitute a Wellsian cornucopia. Enjoy!

About the Author

H. G. Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) is famously often referred to as 'the father of science fiction' but Wells's phenomenal imagination ranged far and wide and included works of comic social realism. Such is Wells's facility with story-telling that well over a century after their publication, that his stories are as fresh and compelling to us today as they would have been when his initial readers first turned their pages, often in astonishment and frequently in amusement.