The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Read online

  ‘The Empire of the Ants’ – A story of eco-disaster. An idea that would be seen now as a bouncing-off point, here is the whole story. Which makes sense, of course: the idea was original, and Wells is a remarkable tale-teller. The story ends with the worrying suggestion by the narrator, Wells, that the second act of this disaster story will occur in Europe in 1950 or 1960.

  ‘The Door in the Wall’ – One of my favourite stories, by anyone. Haunting, magical and sad, and none the less satisfying for being so perfectly predictable. Like a silent comedy, the delight is not in what happens, but in how each event in the chain happens at the perfect moment for it to happen.

  ‘The Wild Asses of the Devil’ – A little brimstone, a little political commentary. What more could anyone wish for?

  There are few enough writers in any field whose short stories will be read a hundred years after they were written. Science fiction in particular has a short sell-by date, one that only the finest writers surpass. Ray Bradbury’s Martian short stories transcend our knowledge that there are no canals on Mars and no atmosphere. Too many near-future tales from too many fine authors were overtaken by events or by breakthroughs in scientific knowledge and became, simply, redundant. H. G. Wells’s stories are, as this collection demonstrates, still astonishingly readable, and, ultimately, the joy of a volume like this is that the stories can and will be read, not as curiosities from the past, but as living things. Wells himself said of his short stories, ‘I make no claims for them and no apology; they will be read as long as people read them. Things written either live or die…’ And of all the things one can say about these stories, to my mind unquestionably the best is this: long after they were written, they live.

  Neil Gaiman

  NOTES

  1. In ‘The Magic Shop’ (1903) and ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ aka ‘The Strange Orchid’ (1894) respectively, not included in this volume.

  2. ‘The Diamond Maker’ (1894), not in this volume.

  3. All Wells quotations below are from his introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911): see Appendix. Edward Garnett (1868–1937), English critic and editor. Son of Richard Garnett, author of Twilight of the Gods, father of David Garnett, author of Lady into Fox and Aspects of Love. George Augustus Moore (1852–1933), Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer who set out to introduce the techniques of French literary realism and naturalism into English fiction.

  4. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) by Jean M. Auel.

  Further Reading

  The most vivid and memorable account of Wells’s life and times is his own Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934). It has been reprinted several times. A ‘postscript’ containing the previously suppressed narrative of his sexual liaisons was published as H. G. Wells in Love, edited by his son G. P. Wells (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). His more recent biographers draw on this material, as well as on the large body of letters and personal papers archived at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The fullest and most scholarly biographies are The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (2nd edn, London: Hogarth Press, 1987) and H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal by David C. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Smith has also edited a generous selection of Wells’s Correspondence (4 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Another highly readable, if controversial and idiosyncratic, biography is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson, 1984) by Wells’s son Anthony West. Michael Foot’s H. G.: The History of Mr Wells (London and New York: Doubleday, 1995) is enlivened by its author’s personal knowledge of Wells and his circle.

  Two illuminating general interpretations of Wells and his writings are Michael Draper’s H. G. Wells (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) and Brian Murray’s H. G. Wells (New York: Continuum, 1990). Both are introductory in scope, but Draper’s approach is critical and philosophical, while Murray packs a remarkable amount of biographical and historical detail into a short space. John Hammond’s An H. G. Wells Companion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and H. G. Wells (Harlow and London: Longman, 2001) combine criticism with useful contextual material. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge, 1972), is a collection of reviews and essays of Wells published during his lifetime. A number of specialized critical and scholarly studies of Wells concentrate on his scientific romances. These include Bernard Bergonzi’s pioneering study of The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John Hunt-ington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Peter Kemp’s H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) offers a lively and, at times, lurid tracing of Wells’s ‘biological themes and imaginative obsessions’, while Roslynn D. Haynes’s H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980) surveys his use of scientific ideas. W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) are studies of his political thought and his schemes for world government. John S. Partington has also edited The Wellsian (The Netherlands: Equilibris, 2003), a selection of essays from the H. G. Wells Society’s annual critical journal of the same name. The American branch of the Wells Society maintains a highly informative website at hgwellsusa.50megs.com

  P.P.

  Note on the Texts

  H. G. Wells’s earliest short stories were published in 1887–8 in the Science Schools Journal, the student magazine that he founded and edited at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. Professionally, however, he owed his inspiration to Lewis Hind, the editor of the Pall Mall Budget, one of the new weekly and monthly magazines which made the 1890s an extraordinarily fertile period for short fiction. The 27-year-old Wells was still an. obscure author of scientific journalism and textbooks when he first met Hind in 1894. Asked to contribute a series of ‘single sitting’ stories drawing on his scientific expertise, he jumped at the opportunity. As he recalled in his 1911 introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (see Appendix), ‘There was a time when life bubbled with short stories’, although it must also be said that his earliest stories, sold to Hind or a rival editor for five guineas each, are quite uneven in quality. For the present selection I have chosen only three of the fifteen items in his first book collection, The Stolen Bacillus, and Other Incidents (London: Methuen, 1895). With one exception the remaining stories are drawn from The Plattner Story, and Others (London: Methuen, 1897), Tales of Space and Time (London and New York: Harper, 1899), Twelve Stories and a Dream (London: Macmillan, 1903) and The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories (London: Nelson, 1911), the latter being a collection of 33 stories of which only 5 were new. Wells wrote very few original short stories after 1911, although The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), later retitled The Complete Short Stories and much reprinted, includes some 60 stories as well as his novella The Time Machine. John Hammond’s new edition of Wells’s Complete Short Stories (London: Dent, 1998) gathers in a further 23 items, the majority of which had not appeared in book form during Wells’s lifetime. Thus there are now 83 short stories known to have been published by Wells, excluding the 14 brief sketches involving a fictional uncle collected as Select Conversations with an Uncle (1895; revised edition, London: University of North London Press, 1992).

  In his Country of the Blind introduction Wells wrote that ‘I have tried to set a date to most of these stories, but… they are not arranged in strictly chronological order.’ For the 1927 Short Stories, however, he or his editor reverted to the order in which they had appeared in the original volumes detailed above. The same order was followed in the Penguin Selected Short Stories, first published in 1958. For the present volume, I have made a new selection, and have arranged the s
tories in chronological order of first (magazine) publication, following what may have been Wells’s intention as he began to compile the 1911 volume. The copy-text for the stories in this book is the 1927 Short Stories, modified as set out below, except in the case of ‘The Wild Asses of the Devil’. For the latter I follow the text as first published in Boon (1915), and not reprinted during Wells’s lifetime. For the Appendix the copy-text is Nelson’s 1911 edition.

  American readers first encountered Wells as a short-story writer in Thirty Strange Stories (New York: Arnold, 1897), a compilation of his first two English volumes together with three extra stories. His subsequent volumes of stories were all published in the United States without significant differences from the English publications. In general, Wells made very few revisions to his short stories once they had appeared in book form. (The exception is ‘The Country of the Blind’, which he enlarged and rewrote near the end of his life for an edition published by Golden Cockerel Press in 1939. The more familiar earlier version is preferred here.) Variant readings are largely confined to the occasional verbal changes that he introduced to eliminate repetitions and careless phrasing as he revised his stories in the 1920s for a series of uniform editions of his works, beginning with the 28-volume Atlantic Edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, and New York: Scribner’s, 1924–7), and including Benn’s Essex Edition as well as their separate volume of Short Stories. I have accepted all of these deliberate changes. The most significant variants are listed below. Where Wells changed the title of a story, this is indicated under ‘Publication History’.

  In the present edition, punctuation and spelling have been modernized; capitalized imposed on Negro and Negroid; and hyphens have been removed from some 70 words, e.g. ‘blood-stained’, ‘step-son’, ‘tooth-brush’, ‘flying-machine’. Other compound words have been joined together or separated according to modern British practice, e.g. ‘everyone’ for ‘every one’, but ‘any rate’ for ‘anyrate’, ‘market square’ for ‘market-square’ and ‘sewing machine’ for ‘sewing-machine’. The spelling of ‘beho(o)ves,’ ‘Burma(h)’, ‘fetish’ (‘fetich’), ‘Hindustan’ (‘Hindostan’), ‘hy(a)ena’ and ‘T(h)ibet’ has been modernized. Some changes which are authorized by the earlier British line of texts (e.g. ‘eh’ for ‘eigh’, ‘leapt’ for ‘leaped’, ‘therefore’ for ‘therefor’) are also made for the sake of internal consistency. In less than a dozen instances, commas or semi-colons have been restored or added for ease of reading. Other substantive emendations are listed below.

  Housestyling of punctuation and spelling has also been implemented to make the text more accessible to the reader: single quotation marks (for doubles) with doubles inside singles as needed; end punctuation placed outside end quotation marks when appropriate; spaced N-dashes (for the heavier, longer M-dash) and M-dashes (for double-length 2M-dash); ‘iz’ spellings (e.g. recognize, not recognise), and acknowledgements and judgement (not acknowledgments and judgment); no full stop after personal titles (Dr, Mr, Mrs) or story titles, which may not follow the capitalization of the copy-text.

  Publication History

  The stories in this volume were published as follows (SB = The Stolen Bacillus, and Other Incidents, PS = The Plattner Story, and Others, TSS = Thirty Strange Stories, TST = Tales of Space and Time, TSD = Twelve Stories and a Dream, CB = The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories, SS = The Short Stories of H. G. Wells):

  ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’: Pall Mall Budget (6 September 1894), SB, TSS, CB, SS.

  ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes’: Pall Mall Budget (28 March 1895), SB, TSS (as ‘The Story of Davidson’s Eyes’), CB, SS.

  ‘The Moth’: Pall Mall Gazette (28 March 1895), SB (as ‘A Moth – “Genus Novo”’), TSS (as ‘A Moth (Genus Unknown)’), CB, SS.

  ‘A Catastrophe’: New Budget (4 April 1895), PS, TSS, SS.

  ‘The Cone’: Unicorn (18 September 1895), PS, TSS, CB, SS.

  ‘The Argonauts of the Air’: Phil May’s Annual (December 1895), PS, TSS, SS.

  ‘Under the Knife’: New Review (January 1896), PS, TSS, CB, SS.

  ‘A Slip under the Microscope’: Yellow Book (January 1896), PS, TSS, CB, SS.

  ‘The Plattner Story’: New Review (April 1896), PS, TSS, CB, SS.

  ‘The Story of the late Mr Elvesham’: Idler (May 1896), PS, TSS, CB, SS.

  ‘In the Abyss’: Pearson’s Magazine (I August 1896), PS, TSS, SS.

  ‘The Sea Raiders’: Weekly Sun Literary Supplement (6 December 1896), PS, TSS, CB, SS (as ‘The Sea-Raiders’).

  ‘The Crystal Egg’: New Review (May 1897), TST, CB, SS. ‘A Story of the Stone Age’: Idler (May–September 1897), TST, SS.

  ‘The Star’: Graphic (December 1897), TST, CB, SS.

  ‘The Man who could work Miracles’: Illustrated London News (July 1898), TST, CB, SS. (Filmed as Man who could work Miracles, with a script by H. G. Wells, London Films, 1935).

  ‘A Dream of Armageddon’: Black and White Budget (May-June 1901), TSD, CB, SS.

  ‘The New Accelerator’: Strand Magazine (December 1901), TSD, CB, SS.

  ‘The Truth about Pyecraft’: Strand Magazine (April 1903), TSD, CB, SS.

  ‘The Country of the Blind’: Strand Magazine (April 1904), CB, SS. (Revised version, London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1939.)

  ‘The Empire of the Ants’: Strand Magazine (December 1905), CB, SS.

  ‘The Door in the Wall’: Daily Chronicle (14 July 1906), CB, SS

  ‘The Wild Asses of the Devil’: Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump …, Prepared for Publication by Reginald Bliss, with an Ambiguous Introduction by H. G. Wells (London: Fisher Unwin, 1915).

  Sources of Substantive Emendations

  Several of these emendations correct obvious misprints in SS (and, in two cases, in all previous editions as well). CSS = Complete Short Stories, 15th impression (reset) (London: Ernest Benn, 1948).

  Page: line Reading adopted Reading rejected

  14:21 shop (SB) ship

  15:35 rubbed (SB) rubbled

  18:26 backwards (SB) backward

  50:1 had pulled (PS) pulled

  68:2 had (PS) have

  72:27 trickling (PS) rickling

  117:20 picture (PS) pictures

  156:20 tentacles (PS) tenacles

  281:37 incidentally (TSD) incidenally

  318:16 liked (CSS) like

  330.35 taxed (CSS) tax

  333:5 that for (CB) for that

  Selected Variant Readings

  Page: line Revised reading Earlier reading(s)

  22:2.3–4 Sir Ray Professor Ray (SB, TSS, CB)

  26:18 without seeing. without seeing.*

  * [Footnote] The reader unaccustomed to microscopes may easily understand this by rolling a newspaper in the form of a tube and looking through it at a book, keeping the other eye open. (SB, TSS)

  27:1 New Genus Genus novo (SB) Genus unknown (TSS)

  68:3–5 themselves. Now… hungry. themselves. (PS, TSS, CB)

  69:36–70:33 myself. At… indolent, myself. The doctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarcely worth while to trouble about washing and dressing, (PS, TSS, CB)

  70:9–10 I had… to eat. I breakfasted in bed. (PS,TSS, CB)

  136:34 questions. questions. Without further comment I leave this extraordinary matter to the reader’s individual judgment. (PS, TSS, CB)

  254:25–6 experiments… type experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them (TST, CB)

  317:26–8 agonized.’Your him.… agonized. (TSD, CB)

  317:36–7 great-gran—’… cried. great gran———’ (TSD, CB)

  Among minor variants, it is notable that in revising these stories Wells intervened some fifteen times to delete the overused adjective ‘little’, as in ‘little room’, ‘a little vague’, etc. In ‘A Dream of Armageddon’, the phrase ‘a scimitar of beach’ (275:21–2) originally read ‘a little beach’.

  Wells looked back on his
career as a short-story writer in the Introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, and again in his Experiment in Autobiography.

  The surviving manuscripts of many of the short stories are in the H. G. Wells Collection at the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among the many selections of Wells’s stories that have been published, only Michael Sherborne’s ‘World’s Classics’ edition of The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) has a critical textual apparatus. In preparing this Penguin Classics selection I have been indebted to this edition and to Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Modern Library, 2004), as well as to John Hammond’s definitive collection of the Complete Short Stories cited on page xxvii. As ever, I am deeply grateful to my editors, Helen Conford and Lindeth Vasey, for their enthusiasm and expertise, to Andy Sawyer for his notes, and to my colleagues in the H. G. Wells Society for their unstinting support for the Penguin Wells editions.

  P.P.

  THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS

  The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Camberwell1 and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire, and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician but fond of whisky, a heavy, red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of the Deity but accepted Carnot’s cycle,2 and he had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry. His helper came out of the mysterious East, and his name was Azuma-zi.3 But Holroyd called him Pooh-bah.4 Holroyd liked a nigger help because he would stand kicking – a habit with Holroyd – and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn the ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the Negro mind brought into abrupt contact with the crown of our civilization Holroyd never fully realized, though just at the end he got some inkling of them.

  To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more Negroid than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and his nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the whites of his eyes were yellow. His broad cheek-bones and narrow chin gave his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind, and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in the reverse way to a European’s. He was short of stature and still shorter of English. In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and – especially after whisky – lectured to him against superstition and missionaries. Azuma-zi, however, shirked the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it.