![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Perspectives on H.G. Wells
Sep. 30th, 2011 12:37 pmI just finished a book of short stories by Herbert George Wells last night. It was an interesting read, but it gave me a different perspective on a few things.
First, Wells wrote about whatever he wanted to and published a lot of short fiction in his lifetime. This book was to my knowledge the only anthology of that work, however, and it contains thirty three tales ranging from short stories of great brevity to novella length works. He states in the foreward to the book that he chose these works for the book as the only things he wrote that were worth reprinting. This is quite different from modern practice, where anthologies of an author's work contain everything he or she has published so far.
Second, there are science fiction tales, fantasy tales, travel tales, romances, horror tales, and all other manners of tales in the book. These tales were written before many of these genres existed, or at least before they were codified, and it's refreshing to encounter an author who wasn't restricted to a particular category, or as is now the case more and more often, sub-category.
The third thing I noticed was that it was difficult to really get a feel for time and place in many of the stories if you looked at trappings. A few referenced telegraphs and steam trains, only one mentioned electric lights, (and that only because the story needed something like an electric light to illuminate a room under the particular circumstances of the story) and after reading a full run of the Horatio Hornblower series which is set in the late 1700's and early to mid 1800's most of the tales could take place alongside the napoleonic wars.This made it clear how much more rapid the pace of change is in our world today -- so much so that there are clear deviding lines between time frames as short as a few years with how things are changing.
It's called The Kingdom of the Blind and Other Stories. It's a good read, and well worth picking up.
First, Wells wrote about whatever he wanted to and published a lot of short fiction in his lifetime. This book was to my knowledge the only anthology of that work, however, and it contains thirty three tales ranging from short stories of great brevity to novella length works. He states in the foreward to the book that he chose these works for the book as the only things he wrote that were worth reprinting. This is quite different from modern practice, where anthologies of an author's work contain everything he or she has published so far.
Second, there are science fiction tales, fantasy tales, travel tales, romances, horror tales, and all other manners of tales in the book. These tales were written before many of these genres existed, or at least before they were codified, and it's refreshing to encounter an author who wasn't restricted to a particular category, or as is now the case more and more often, sub-category.
The third thing I noticed was that it was difficult to really get a feel for time and place in many of the stories if you looked at trappings. A few referenced telegraphs and steam trains, only one mentioned electric lights, (and that only because the story needed something like an electric light to illuminate a room under the particular circumstances of the story) and after reading a full run of the Horatio Hornblower series which is set in the late 1700's and early to mid 1800's most of the tales could take place alongside the napoleonic wars.This made it clear how much more rapid the pace of change is in our world today -- so much so that there are clear deviding lines between time frames as short as a few years with how things are changing.
It's called The Kingdom of the Blind and Other Stories. It's a good read, and well worth picking up.
