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H. G. Wells

Scientific visionary. Social prophet. Master storyteller. Few novelists have captivated generations of readers like H. G. Wells. In enduring, electrifying detail, he takes us to dimensions of time and space that have haunted our dreams for centuries -- and shows us ourselves as we really are.

The Time Machine

In the heart of Victorian England, an inquisitve gentleman known only as the Time Traveler constructs an elaborate invention that hurtles him hundreds of thousands of years into the future. There he finds himself in the violent center of the ultimate conflict between beings of light and creatures of darkness.

The War of the Worlds

Martians invade Great Britain, laying waste turn-of-the-century London. This tale of conquest by superior beings with superadvanced technology is so nightmarishly real that an adaptation by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater sent hundreds of impressionable radio listeners into panicked flight forty years after the story's original publication.

Famous for the mistaken panic that ensued from Orson Welles’s 1938 radio dramatization, The War of the Worlds remains one of the most influential of all science fiction works.

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. Naïve locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag—only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge.

Soon the whole of human civilization is under threat as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroying all life in their path with black gas and burning ray. The forces of Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they appear.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, April 1987 and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #92 May 2014. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois, Invaders! (1993) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois and War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches (1996) edited by Kevin J. Anderson. It is included in the collections Night of the Cooters (1990) and Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction, 1980 - 2005 (2008).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Sidewise Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 1996. The story can also be found in the anthologies War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches (1996), edited by Kevin J. Anderson, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Frankensteins and Foreign Devils (1998).