Introducing his own selection of his short stories (The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, 1913), he discusses the form and his relation to it. Citing the work of Kipling, Henry James, Conrad, and many others, he calls the 1890s the high point of the short story and speaks of “lyrical brevity and a vivid finish” as its virtues. Chekhov had not yet been translated, to show the limitless possibilities of the form. Maupassant’s bleak, tight, neat tales were the accepted model. Wells could not be comfortable with that. “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,” he wrote. “I refuse altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story….” He was surely right to do so; but his own almost patronizing description of it as “this compact and amusing form” hardly includes Henry James’s, or Kipling’s, or his own best stories, though it describes the lesser ones very well.
He knew the difference, of course. In 1939, in his discussion of his revision of what is probably his finest story, “The Country of the Blind,” he says he had lost his tolerance for the idea story, the gimmick, the trick ending—the potboiler he had written so many of. “You laid hands on almost anything that came handy, a droning dynamo, a fluttering bat, a bacteriologist’s tube… ran a slight human reaction round it, put it in the oven, and there you were.” He could have gone on doing it forever, he says, but for the feeling that “not only might the short story be a lovely, satisfying, significant thing, but that it ought to be so, that a short story that wasn’t whole and complete like a living thing, but just something bought and cut off like half a yard of chintz on a footstool, was either an imposture or a lost opportunity.” But “the vogue for appreciating the exceptional in short stories was passing,” he says, and when he tried to write stories that didn’t suit the market, editors rejected his submissions, and so he “drifted out of the industry.”
He had quit selling cloth by the yard at seventeen when he broke his apprenticeship. Selling words by the yard got him going as a writer, but maybe it led him to underestimate the form itself. For it is certainly untrue that the short story flowered in the 1890s and then declined into triviality; it went on developing and flourishing right through the twentieth century. I wonder if what stopped him was not so much the editors’ lack of appreciation for the exceptional as the critics’ increasing restriction of literary fiction to social and psychological realism, all else being brushed aside as subliterary entertainment. No matter how good his stories, if they were fantastic in theme or drew on science or history or any intellectual discipline for their subject, they could be dismissed categorically as “genre fiction.”
It is a risk every imaginative writer runs, even now; writers who crave literary respectability still hasten to deny that their science fiction is science fiction. At least Wells stood by his imaginary guns. But he stopped firing them.
Meanwhile, The Time Machine has never been out of print for a hundred and some years now. And though only a few of the short stories have come near that genuine literary permanence, the best of them remain vividly alive, amazingly pertinent, sometimes unnervingly prescient, as haunting as nightmares or as bright unrecallable dreams.
I chose twenty-six stories from the eighty-four collected in John Hammond’s massive and invaluable Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells. I selected for excellence, of course, not as defined by the standards of realism, which have little use or application here, but generic excellence. Was the story outstanding in itself for intellectual urgency or moral passion, for some particular virtue or strangeness or beauty? Was the story outstanding of its kind, and was the kind an interesting one? Was it fruitful, vital, did it lead forward to other works of other writers? It makes no sense to me to define “great” art as inimitable, unique, a dead end, and to prize only such greatness. Seeing art as a community enterprise both in place and time, I think an art that leads to more art is more valuable than sterile excellence.
Certain stories I left out with regret; one is “A Story of the Days to Come,” full of interesting stuff, but so long it would have taken up half the book. I would have liked to include some of the satirical, joking tales that Wells was good at, such as “Aepyornis Island” and “The Pearl of Love”—but being light, they got pushed out of the boat.
Because almost all Wells’s stories are genre stories and because I value them as such, I arranged them, not chronologically, but in sections by kind. Each section has a brief introduction, discussing what kind of stories they are, where this kind of story came from and what it may have led to.
As for trying to sum up the stories as a whole, as a set, it’s difficult. Wells is an elusive writer. Certainly one sees his distinctive style throughout the book. Many of the stories are told in a journalistic tone, easy and breezy, extremely self-confident but unpretentious, clear, moving forward at a good clip—it all seems quite simple, quite artless, which is exactly what the author wanted. He distrusted the high aesthetic manner (a charming note to his friendship with Henry James is that each man confessed he often longed to rewrite the other’s stories). But he was a careful writer and tireless rewriter, keenly aware of what he was doing, sensitive and skilled in his craft. A modulation of his tone can be as effective as a key-change in music.
We are often told that, in stories written less to reveal individual experience or character than to entertain or inform or stimulate the imagination, plot is needed to provide structure, and action is all-important. Wells plotted cleverly, and his action scenes are vivid and suspenseful; but his true mastery, I think, was in that very difficult, underestimated, even maligned element of storytelling, visual description. Wells can make you see what he wants you to see. When this is something that does not in fact exist, a fantastic scene, a dream or prophecy, his power seems uncanny. He was—literally—a visionary. Perhaps the finest things he wrote are the wonderful description of a lunar morning in The First Men in the Moon and the glimpses of the dying world at the end of The Time Machine. In the short stories one comes again and again on a similarly vivid scene, a glimpse into another world, fearful or radiant or simply very strange. These visions have the authority, in memory, of something seen with one’s own eyes. A squadron of airplanes over Naples (two years before Kitty Hawk)— two men laughing and making faces at people who stand frozen in time—a dreaming garden behind a door in a wall—the faces of the townsfolk in the Country of the Blind….
PART ONE
VISIONARY SCIENCE FICTION
INTRODUCTION
The first story in this book is the only one in it that obeys the rules of fictional realism. Nothing impossible happens, so it isn’t fantasy. Nothing “futuristic” or “predictive” or “speculative” happens, so most people wouldn’t call it science fiction. But it is about scientists. And about being young, and poor, and ambitious.
It certainly draws its setting from Wells’s experience at the Normal School of Science (now the Imperial College of Science and Technology) as a scholarship student among mostly middle-class students and professors. The competition in science to be first, get the top mark, the hot job, was fierce enough to drive students to cheating, already in the 1880s—a sad note. But what the story really is about is, to alter C. P. Snow’s title, “the conscience of the poor.” An insecure, angry, striving boy, a cobbler’s son among the sons (and daughters) of the professional classes, is tempted by pure chance to cheat. He knows all too well that lower social status is assumed to mean lower ethical standards. So what does he do? The moral question posed is complex; the outcome is subtle and disturbing.