However, the story soon focuses on Bert who is an unimpressive, not particularly gifted, unsuccessful young man with few ideas about larger things - but far from unintelligent. He has a strong attachment to a young woman named Edna, and works as a helper and later a partner in a bicycle shop. When bankruptcy threatens one summer, he and his partner abandon the shop, devise a singing act ("the Desert Dervishes"), and resolve to try their fortunes in English sea resorts. As chance would have, their initial performance is interrupted by a balloon which lands on the beach before them, and which...

H G Wells, Herbert George Wells, an English writer, he was renowned for his works of science fiction especially 'The Time Machine'. He is also referred as 'The Father of Science Fiction' "Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences," H.G. Wells wrote in 1916. "For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind. ... The scientific training develops the idea that...

The World Set Free is a novel written in 1913 and published in 1914 by H. G. Wells. The book is based on a prediction of nuclear weapons of a more destructive and uncontrollable sort than the world has yet seen. It had appeared first in serialised form with a different ending as A Prophetic Trilogy, consisting of three books: A Trap to Catch the Sun, The Last War in the World and The World Set Free. A frequent theme of Wells's work, as in his 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations, was the history of humans' mastery of power and energy through technological advance, seen as a determinant of human...

Tono-Bungay is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine created by his ambitious uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of a product which he believes to be "a damned swindle." He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics. But he remains associated with his uncle Edward, who becomes a financier of the first order and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to...

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men-this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the steam-engine. Thirteen short stories by HG Wells, the master of speculative fiction Included in this collection is "Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland" where a...

The protagonist is the novel's first-person narrator, Stephen Stratton. The Passionate Friends is written as if addressed to Stephen's eldest son, who is on the verge of adolescence. Stephen is the only child of a rector who loses his faith due to Darwinism. The most important relationship of Stephen's life is with the Lady Mary Christian (later Lady Mary Justin), a beautiful blue-eyed contemporary who has been his childhood "playmate" and with whom he falls deeply in love at the age of nineteen during the summer before he begins his studies at Oxford. Mary returns his love, but will not...

The Wheels of Chance was written at the height of the cycling craze (1890-1905), when practical, comfortable bicycles first became widely and cheaply available and before the rise of the automobile (see History of the bicycle). The advent of the bicycle stirred sudden and profound changes in the social life of England. Even the working class could travel substantial distances, quickly and cheaply, and the very idea of travelling for pleasure became a possibility for thousands of people for the first time. This new freedom affected many. It began to weaken the rigid English class structure and...

Pered vami odno iz samykh masshtabnykh poloten za vsyu istoriyu mirovoy nauchnoy fantastiki - prakticheski, ne imeyushchaya analogov v literature, zhestkaya realistichnaya kartina konfrontatsii cheloveka s nevedomym i nepoznannym. Itak: krakh starogo mira, opustevshie ulitsy evropeyskikh gorodov i zhutkiy voy sireny nad ruinami. Tolpy bezhentsev - eshche vchera mirnykh sytykh obyvateley. Tak chto zhe proizoshlo? K kontsu 19 veka bol'shinstvo astronomov vsey Zemli sklonyalis' k mneniyu, chto na Marse mogut sushchestvovat' ne bolee chem primitivnye formy zhizni, sama ideya vozmozhnogo...

Tales of Space and Time is a fantasy and science fiction collection of three short stories and two novellas written by the English author H. G. Wells between 1897 and 1898. It was first published by Doubleday & McClure Co. in 1899. All the stories had first been published in various monthly periodicals and this was the first volume to collect these stories.

The First Men in the Moon is a scientific romance published in 1901 by the English author H. G. Wells, who called it one of his "fantastic stories." The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon undertaken by the two protagonists, a businessman narrator, Mr. Bedford, and an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor. Bedford and Cavor discover that the moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites.The narrator is a London businessman who withdraws to the countryside to write a play, by which he hopes to alleviate his financial...