Selected Stories of H. G. Wells Read Free Page A

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.
    It is significant that the crux of the story is what young Hill sees on a microscope slide: a field of vision. That’s why I put the story in this section, though it is “scientist fiction” rather than science fiction. In one way or another all the stories in this section have to do with
what
somebody sees.
“I saw it with my own eyes”—that’s how we attest to the reality of the implausible. Imaginative literature takes us into other worlds, altered states of consciousness, alien perceptions, by making us see another reality or see through other eyes. H. G. Wells was singularly gifted at presenting such changed fields of vision with intense, vivid actuality.
    “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” is a what-if: what if a man could see only what he’d see if he were someplace else? The premise is perfectly fantastic, but the setting is a laboratory, and Wells works out the implications elegantly, with science-fictional accuracy and aplomb.
    “The Plattner Story” and “The Stolen Body” are two quite different approaches to a similar subject: a man disappears—one in an explosion, one in an experiment—out of ordinary life, sees some very strange things, and reappears. . . . The tale is like that of the Time Traveler, but instead of the future these men visit other worlds coexistent with ours, ominous and weird. These are ghost stories, reveling in the uncanny, playing with the theme of alternate realities, of a world that shadows, that tries to break through, into what we call the real world.
    “Under the Knife” is a story of altered states of mind: the psychology of a man just before a major operation; an out-of-body experience, in which the disembodied patient sees the surgeon make a fatal mistake; and then a tremendous, headlong, visionary voyage through time and space and spirit. . . . I think this is one of the most extraordinary stories in this book, and I can’t imagine anyone but this author writing anything remotely like it. It is quintessential Wells.
    In “The Crystal Egg,” the medium of vision, the way of seeing the other world, is through a crystal. A familiar idea, with ages of wishful thinking behind it. And the tale with its curiosity-shop setting seems to be of a familiar fantasy type. But when we see what is to be seen through the stone, and realize where it is, we’re reading classic science fiction. Yet, returning to the fantasy element, I cherish the notion that J. R. R. Tolkien may well have read this story, and that in the crystal egg lies the ancestor of the
palantir.
    “The New Accelerator” is a highly original time-travel story, with many descendants in fiction throughout the twentieth century. The idea of moving really,
really
fast, so fast nobody could even see you, so fast that time would seem to freeze—did we learn that notion from Wells, or is it something children have always imagined? Certainly Professor Gibberne is Superman’s great-grandfather. . . . Again, Wells works out with wonderful vividness what the (as far as we know) impossible experience would feel like, look like, sound like—and how it would affect those experiencing it. There are some fine throwaway lines, too. My favorite is “We ceased to smoulder almost at once.”

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