From the invasion of man-eating cephalopods to the mortifications of an unsightly nose, from interplanetary Armageddon to a housemaid's broken heart, Wells' short stories range in their subject matter from the terrible to the trivial, the astonishing to the absurd. Yet however extravagant his scientific fantasies, his human concerns are always profoundly down-to-earth.
One of the founding-fathers of science fiction, it is in his short stories that Wells first explored the enormous potential of the scientific discoveries of his age. In this first ever complete collection of his stories, 84 minor miracles of the storyteller's art remind us of the relevance of this greatest of modern dreamers.
