The Time Machine / The Invisible Man [Paperback]

Together in one indispensable volume,The Time MachineandThe Invisible Manare masterpieces of irony and imaginative vision from H. G. Wells, the father of science fiction.

The Time Machineconveys the Time Traveller into the distant future and an extraordinary world. There, stranded on a slowly dying Earth, he discovers two bizarre races: the effete Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks—a haunting portrayal of Darwin’s evolutionary theory carried to a terrible conclusion.

The Invisible Manis the fascinating tale of a brash young scientist who, experimenting on himself, becomes invisible and then criminally insane, trapped in the terror of his own creation.

Convincing and unforgettably real, these two classics are consummate representations of the stories that defined science fiction—and inspired generations of readers and writers.

With an Introduction by John Calvin Batchelor
and an Afterword by Paul YoungquistHerbert George Wells(1866–1946) was born in Bromley, Kent, England. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady’s maid. Although “Bertie” left school at fourteen to become a draper’s apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novelThe Time Machinerescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher’s salary. His other “scientific romances”—The Island of Dr. Moreau(1896),The Invisible Man(1897),The War of the Worlds(1898),The First Men in the Moon(1901), andThe War in the Air(1908)—won him distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase lÓ*