Essential Novelists - H. G. Wells

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H. G. Wells. Essential Novelists - H. G. Wells

Table of Contents

Author

Time Machine

I – Introduction

II - The Machine

III - The Time Traveller Returns

IV - Time Travelling

V - In the Golden Age

VI - The Sunset of Mankind

VII - A Sudden Shock

VIII – Explanation

IX - The Morlocks

X - When Night Came

XI - The Palace of Green Porcelain

XII - In the Darkness

XIII - The Trap of the White Sphinx

XIV - The Further Vision

XV - The Time Traveller’s Return

XVI - After the Story

Epilogue

The War of the Worlds

Book One. The Coming of the Martians

I – The Eve of the War

II – The Falling Star

III – On Horsell Common

IV – The Cylinder Opens

V – The Heat Ray

VI – The Heat Ray in the Chobham Road

VII – How I Reached Home

VIII – Friday Night

IX – The Fighting Begins

X – In the Storm

XI – At the Window

XII – What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton

XIII – How I fell in with the Curate

XIV – In London

XV – What Had Happened in Surrey

XVI – The Exodus From London

XVII – The “Thunder Child”

Book Two. The Earth Under the Martians

I – Under Foot

II – What We Saw From The Ruined House

III – The Days Of Imprisonment

VI – The Death Of The Curate

V – The Stillness

VI – The Work Of Fifteen Days

VII – The Man On Putney Hill

VIII – Dead London

IX - Wreckage

X – The Epilogue

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Title Page

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“The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching explosion—would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerves. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.

“There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. ‘Fine hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.’

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