Old Books by Dead Guys: Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells

Friday, August 18, 2023

Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells

A jack of all trades, master of some

In America at least (I think the case might be different in Britain), H. G. Wells is known for a very specific range of dark, pessimistic science fiction novels: The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man. Wells was a very prolific author, however, who wrote in a wide variety of genres, including crime stories, romance, humor, history, politics, and philosophy. Looking over his body of work, it seems that Wells never wanted to be ghettoized as a science fiction writer and therefore liked to stretch himself by venturing into other genres and forms, even those which are rather mundane compared to the fantastical visions he’s known for. Wells published over 80 short stories, which were gathered into six collections published during his lifetime. With perhaps one exception, these collections tend to be miscellaneous grab bags of all the genres Wells dabbled in, successfully or not. Such is the case with Twelve Stories and a Dream, published in 1903.

Though there are no tales of outer space or time travel in this volume, it does include other varieties of science fiction—natural science, chemistry, medical science—and these tend to be the collection’s most successful selections. “The Truth about Pyecraft” and “The New Accelerator” both involve medicinal potions that perform wonders but also result in the unexpected side effects of science gone wrong. “The Valley of Spiders” is like a good old-fashioned killer-animal monster movie. On the downside, “Filmer,” the story of an aviation pioneer, manages to take the wonder of flight and the excitement of mechanical invention and render them lethargic and boring. Too many stories in this volume venture into spiritualism and the supernatural—magic, ghosts, astral projection, fairies—where the atheistic Wells feels less than comfortable. Add to that a couple of crime stories, “Mr. Ledbetter’s Vacation” and “Mr. Brisher’s Treasure,” both comical in nature and moderately enjoyable in quality.

I tend to think that Wells is always at his best when he goes dark, bordering on horror, but maybe here he’s proved me wrong. One of the more satisfying entries in this book is “Miss Winchelsea’s Heart,” a silly comic romance that lampoons its own heroine with somewhat mean-spirited sarcasm. On the other hand, a story like “A Dream of Armageddon” should be right up Wells’s dystopian alley, but it ends up being one of the book’s weakest selections. The narrator meets a man on a train who tells him about a vividly realistic recurring dream he has had. The dream takes place in the future and involves a world war. Wells has little interesting to say about the future or the war, however, opting instead to dwell on a maudlin love story that’s familiar, boring, and pointless. And is the dream structure even necessary? Why not just tell a story set in the future? This a problem common to a lot of Wells’s stories: unnecessarily long setups before the tale even begins to be told.

Of Wells’s short story collections that I’ve read so far, I have liked Tales of Space and Time the best. The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents is another mixed bag of genres, but overall it’s slightly better than Twelve Stories and a Dream. In general, however, if I’m going to read a collection of short stories where science fiction is mixed in with a lot of other genres, I would opt for a volume by Arthur Conan Doyle, who exercises his versatility more successfully than Wells.

Stories in this collection