Keeping on with my kick of ‘catching up’ on classic books, authors, and styles I simply never got to until now, I had picked up a fun box set of essential HG Wells and happily started here. The challenge always of rating a collection of stories is how varied they can be, but this book served as a great introduction collection of Wells. 

What surprised me was how many of these were not sci-fi in the traditional sense but spanned genre: horror, fantasy, monster, war. They definitely all read of the same series in different ways given Wells’ distinct style and voice: matter of the fact, straightforward, and almost ‘reporting’ fantastical elements as though they are mundane and commonplace. 

The Time Machine was unsurprisingly the stand out and really fun to read the first real use of the idea of an inventor creating a Time Machine, as well as how Wells uses it to talk about themes that ring extremely true to this day in the study of class and societal hierarchy. Our current situation in that regard would probably make Wells grimace knowingly. 

The other stories were also great to dive into, with the standouts for me being Empire of the Ants, Lord of the Dynamos, Country of the Blind, Door in the Wall, and the Plattner Story.