H.G. Wells - Böcker

H G Wells roman Den osynlige mannen i nyöversättning och med efterord av Christian Ekvall. H G Wells är upphovsman till flera så kallade moderna klassiker av vilka detta är en. Den skrevs för mer än hundra år sedan (1897). Den har filmatiserats flera gånger om. Den har aldrig förlorat sin hypnotiska dragningskraft. Den hittar ständigt nya läsare. Handlingen börjar en ovädersnatt när snön yr över en liten by i England. En man stiger in på värdshuset och vill ha ett rum. Han är omsorsgfullt klädd mot kylan, halsduken täcker nedre delen av ansiktet och hatten är djupt neddragen så att inte heller övre delen av ansiktet syns. De mörka glasögonen skymmer ögonen. Han slänger generöst två guldmynt på disken, får sitt rum och förklarar med barsk och irriterad röst att han vill bli lämnad helt ifred, att han inte på några som helst villkor får bli störd. Ändå vågar värdshusvärdinnan en stund senare öppna hans dörr för att fråga om han vill ha mat. Hon reagerar över att gästen fortfarande har rocken och hatten på sig och att han - i samma ögonblick som hon öppnar dörren - hastigt håller upp sidenhalsduken framför munnen som om det vore mycket viktigt för honom att dölja hela ansiktet. Det är upptakten till denna synnerligen spännande roman, en riktig page-turner, som handlar om en vetenskapsman vid namn Griffin som upptäckt ett sätt att göra sig själv osynlig, en förmåga som först gör honom alldeles upprymd. Han inser att han lyckats med något som alla andra alltid trott varit omöjligt. Men strax hopar sig problemen... H G Wells föddes i Londonförorten Bromley 1866 och växte upp under enkla förhållanden. Han lyckades själv bekosta sina studier genom att arbeta som biträdande lärare. Samtidigt skrev han berättelser som han försökte få publicerade. 1895 kom hans genombrott med romanen Tidsmaskinen. Från denna stund blev han en mycket produktiv författare. Kulmen i skrivhastighet uppnådde han kort före sekelskiftet 1900 när han utkom med hela elva böcker på tre år, varav åtminstone fyra idag tillhör kategorin moderna klassiker. De har alla filmatiserats: Tidsmaskinen, Doktor Moreaus ö, Den osynlige mannen och Världarnas krig. (Den sistnämnda gick dessutom till radiohistorien när Wells nästan namne Orson Welles gjorde sin berömda ljudversion 1938 - utgiven av Bakhåll på CD i serien Bakhåll Sound Archive - radioreportaget om invasion från rymden som många lyssnare uppfattade som äkta nyhetssändning så att panik utbröt.) H G Wells roman Den osynlige mannen i översättning och med efterord av Christian Ekvall. ISBN 978-91-7742-628-8. Högkvalitetspapper, sydda ark, mjuka pärmar med flikar, 240 sidor.

Edward Prendick is shipwrecked and finds himself stranded on an island in the Pacific. Here he meets the sinister Dr Moreau, a vivisectionst driven out of Britain in disgrace. And soon strange events cause Prendick to uncover the full horror of Dr Moreau's activities on the island.THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU mixes discussion on the divide between humans and the animal kingdom and chilling macabre horror in an unrivalled fashion. Its question on how far science should go is one that rings true today as it did when it was first published.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University.In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines terrifying futures in which civilisation itself is threatened.The narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick to discover that what appeared to be a falling star was, in fact, a metallic cylinder landing from Mars. Six million people begin to flee London in panic as tentacled invaders emerge and overpower the city. With their heat-ray, killing machines, black gas, and a taste for fresh human blood, is there anything that can be done to stop the Martians?In The War in the Air, naive but resourceful Bert Smallways is thrilled by speed and fascinated by the new flying machines. His curiosity sweeps him away by accident into a German plan to conquer America, beginning with the destruction of New York. The ease of movement in aerial warfare means that nothing and nobody is safe as Total War erupts, civilisation crumbles, and Bert's hopes of getting back to London to marry his love seem impossibly distant.

Dominoes is an enjoyable series of illustrated classic and modern stories in four carefully graded language stages - from Starter to Three - which takes learners from beginner to intermediate level. Each Domino reader includes:Dominoes can be purchased as standalone readers or as part of an audio pack which includes the graded reader alongside downloadable MP3 audio.

Dominoes is an enjoyable series of illustrated classic and modern stories in four carefully graded language stages - from Starter to Three - which takes learners from beginner to intermediate level. Each Domino reader includes:Dominoes can be purchased as standalone readers or as part of an audio pack which includes the graded reader alongside downloadable MP3 audio.

This collection includes The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon and The Invisible Man - all collected in a stunning leather-bound omnibus.Five of the best science fiction novels by the Grandfather of Science Fiction: unsurpassed in their timeless capacity to thrill and transfix, these are tales that reach to the heart of human ambition, fear, intelligence and hope.The Time Machine was Wells' first major piece of fiction: a haunting vision of a far future earth orbiting a sun cooling to extinction.The War of the Worlds: still considered by many to be the best novel of alien invasion ever written.The Island of Doctor Moreau: with its terrible creation The House of Pain, this tale anticipated our terror of genetic engineering.The Invisible Man: the classic study of scientific hubris.The First Men in the Moon: a Scientific Romance, a fantastical voyage a dystopian nightmare revealed.

The Time Machine is one of the most enduring works of the English language. A hundred years after it was first published, the book continues to be studied.The 1895 London first edition is used as a basis for the exhaustive annotations and other critical apparatus of the world's foremost Wellsian scholar. The widely reprinted version of 1924 is also fully accounted for. For most students, one of the chief points of interest is what the novel signified to readers when it was first published and how it relates to Wells's later works. Accordingly, the annotations focus on these questions. The introduction gives in great depth the background of the work and its complex bibliographical history, and a synopsis of the literary conventions that Wells used.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote some of the great classics of speculative fiction in English, including The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), which might be said to be about unholy genetics. The work's biological and sociopolitical ideas are still current (such were the range and depth of Wells' ideas).Wells continued to work on Doctor Moreau for nearly thirty years after its initial publication in London (the New York first edition added a subtitle A Possibility), finally letting go of the work after the publication of the Atlantic Edition in 1924. Annotated by the premier Wellsian scholar, this is an exhaustive critical edition, examining the historical, medical, philosophical and literary contexts of the story.

H.G. Wells barely revised The Invisible Man once it was published, adding only an epilogue. But the opening statement of that epilogue--"So ends the strange and evil experiment of the Invisible Man"--has posed challenges to scholars. How to understand it? Does it speak strictly to the scientific elements of the novel? Or is it a part of the work's political underpinnings? The 1897 New York first edition (the first edition to incorporate the epilogue) is used here as the basis for the exhaustive annotations and other critical apparatus of the world's foremost Wellsian scholar. The introduction examines in great detail the novel's position in the Wellsian canon and sets the major themes in context with the literary conventions used in his other works, particularly the scientific romances.

Wells' novel, a "scientific romance," attained perhaps its greatest fame in another form, the infamous realistic 1939 radio broadcast "Invasion from Mars" by the redoubtable Orson Welles. It was also notably made into an early fifties science fiction adventure movie (and there have been other adaptations as well). So indelible is the association that the novel, like the panic inducing broadcast and the Hollywood flick, now is taken as little more than a light fantasy of outerspace terror and human heroism, far from the author's original vision. The War of the Worlds is a philosophical tale and as such, is profoundly ideological. The world of the Martians represents the progressive future of humanity in a cultural war with our world of tradition and reaction--these are the two worlds in question.The Mars from which the invaders come is united by a planet-wide system of irrigation canals; for Wells this indicates a socialist world-state. The red planet is red in more than one sense, pointing the direction of terrestrial progress. The Martians in the novel are octopoidal monsters, bodily anticipating the tentacular, all-controlling totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

Critics view When the Sleeper Wakes as a prototype of the anti-utopian novel, a genre developed by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell into nightmare futures associated with the totalitarian age and the moral horrors of fascism and communism. Annotated by the world's leading Wellsian scholar, in Sleeper is found a greater measure of artistry and characterization than is usually accorded it. As a complex work combining technological with social speculation, Sleeper is unmatched for canniness in the history of futuristic literature. Indeed, its aeronautical details influenced the Wright Brothers in the design of their flyer, and the novel predicts the promotion of airplanes as a weapon, a prophecy dramatically fulfilled in the twentieth century. This exhaustive critical edition features a lengthy introduction, appendices, bibliography and index, and a frontispiece taken from the original 1899 edition.

The First Men in the Moon is the last in a series of "scientific romances" begun by Wells with The Time Machine. In the opinion of many, it is also the last in a series of pessimistic and anti-utopian novels before Wells took up the tone of an optimistic and utopian social prophet with Anticipations. The present critical edition of First Men questions that opinion. The lunar utopia described is far from a satire on the industrial order as many critics claim, but in historical context is instead related to the international scientific management movement, stemming from the Saint-Simonian school of socialism. This critical edition shows how First Men consciously builds on the whole literary tradition of moon voyages.

Much attention has been paid to the "scientific romance" novels of H.G. Wells, a founder of modern science fiction and one of the genre's greatest writers. In comparison, little attention has been given by critics to his works of fantasy, which in the opinion of many, are just as artistic and worthy of study. This work, takes a critical look at Wells' little known fantasy The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine, which is "a parable of dark foreboding that unveils the nothingness of utopian dreams" and foreshadows Franz Kafka's dark fables of the totalitarian age. A lengthy introduction by the editor provides a comprehensive overview of the text and the story of The Sea Lady, and serves to explain the ideas of civil death and every citizen's acting as a public servant, and the concept of totalitarian metaphysics, which deals with a revolt against the limits of the human condition. This work provides a complete, extensively annotated text of the 1902 London first edition of The Sea Lady.

Man Who Could Work Miracles (without a The) is a 1937 film, ostensibly a comedy, that H.G. Wells scripted late in life for London Film Productions. This work is a literary text of the scenario and dialogue published in advance of the movie's release. Wells himself says it is "a companion piece" to Things to Come, his deadly serious film done a year before, also produced by Alexander Korda.The editor's introduction explains how two such radically different films are related and discusses the artistic quality of the text, Wells' overriding sense of cosmic vision, his views on sex and politics, and his uncommon estimate of the common man's incapacity for public affairs. The world's foremost Wellsian scholar here brings his unique analytical powers to bear on, in the opinion of many, the strangest work Wells ever wrote. The appendices include the 1898 short story version, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," three related cosmic-vision short stories by Wells, and an excerpt from a 1931 radio address by Wells not inaccurately retitled "If I Were Dictator of the World."

Things to Come is the 1936 release of London Films, produced from the 1935 "film story" by H.G. Wells, the text of the present work. The book includes more than 100 illustrations, most of them publicity stills that are all the more relevant because Wells, for a script writer, had unusual control over the actual film production. The images are very much a direct expression of his film story.Done at age 70, Things to Come reflects on a long literary career, in both fiction and nonfiction, often given to the fate of man and the prospect of a unified world state, a utopian future realized in the film by A.D. 2036. That is what is coming: the end of warfare between belligerent nation states. Now the new frontier of human conquest is space, begun at film's end with the first firing of a gigantic space gun.

When the Time Traveller explains his theory about travelling through time to his dinner guests, they are initially sceptical. He returns a week later, pale and limping, with an astonishing tale about encountering strange new worlds and different species. The guests are left wondering if he sets foot in his Time Machine again, will he ever return?

Townsfolk soon suspect something sinister underneath Griffin's creepy, bandaged exterior and are horrified by the chilling revelation that he is, in fact, completely invisible. His invisibility gives Griffin an untouchable power, and he will now stop at nothing to get what he wants.

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fictionWhen Edward Prendick is shipwrecked on a tropical island, he is surprised to find he has company in the form of Dr Moreau.Driven out of Britain in disgrace, Dr Moreau has decided to explore his science in peace and isolation.It isn't long before Prendick discovers the horrors it involves . . .Considered widely to be one of the fathers of science fiction, H.G. Wells' story of a mad scientist pushing the boundaries of humanity sits alongside Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the annals of British classics. The novel has been adapted multiple times, and is referenced in many different media.'The most important of all nineteenth-century sf writers in the UK and in America' - The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'Short, cold, economic and totally unrelenting. An utterly terrifying book' - China Miéville'One of our bravest and most stimulating writers' - Telegraph