Annotated H.G. Wells – serie

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."