About the book: 2024 / English prose writer Herbert Wells is one of the founders of science fiction, the author of about two hundred books, a writer whose fictions, ideas, observations, foresights, warnings and educational efforts changed the consciousness of people of the 20th century. In addition to the famous novels, the names and images of which have become firmly established in the linguistic and cultural everyday life of mankind, Wells also created almost a hundred stories, marked by inexhaustible invention, the breadth of the thematic repertoire and the invariably entertaining plots. This collection includes iconic examples of the writer’s short prose: here is an early story that anticipated the collisions of “The Time Machine” and “The Invisible Man”, and witty observations on the characters and morals of the British, and stories about the creative torment of an artist, and ironic detective stories, and a gloomy a sketch about deferred revenge, and a burlesque from the life of an aviation pioneer, and a dystopian novella about the distant future, and, of course, fantastic stories about the mysterious and inexplicable…