H. G. WELLS, BERTIE to his friends, was, with Jules Verne, the person who gave us the scientific romance. His short stories, and proto-science fiction novels, are still read today, while many of the mainstream novels he considered more important and significant are gone and, for the most part, forgotten, perhaps because the novels were very much of their time, while some of the science fiction and fantasy novels and tales are, for all their late Victorian or Edwardian setting, quite timeless.

Wells’s novels set a pattern. The madman on his island making people out of animals, the journey through time or into space, all have been imitated, ever since, taken as templates by other authors: the arrival in a small Sussex village of an invisible man – his self-imposed confinement to his room, the brilliant but forgettable hero barely introduced until we are past the hundredth page, the revelation and explanation of poor, mad albino Griffin – is not just the story of The Invisible Man, but it is the shape for a thousand other stories. Wells’s science fiction books were novels of ideas as much as of people; arguably they are also all novels of class, metaphorically (as Dr Moreau creates an underclass of beast-men; the Time Traveller encounters an effete upper class and a monstrous lower class) or literally – poor mad Griffin is a lower middle-class creature out of his depth.

The short stories, for the most part, tend to be something else.

It has been said that the Golden Age of science fiction is when you were 12 years old, and it could certainly be argued that Wells wrote his short stories for 12-year-olds, or for the 12-year-olds inside adults. (I read most of these stories first as an 11-year-old boy. I found a thick, red-covered collection of the Science Fiction Short Stories of H. G. Wells on a shelf in a schoolroom and read it several times. They did not feel dusty or anachronistic or even outdated. The flowering of the strange orchid disturbed me and the unsatisfactory nature of the Magic Shop left me wondering. It was good.)

These are tales of obsession and revelation and discovery. Mostly they remind us that they are, in some sense, eyewitness reports, with all the limitations and power of such. We are told repeatedly what was seen, and only a little more, and left to draw our own inferences. Was a man translated through the fourth dimension, and did he see hungry spirit-creatures there? Did man-eating octopuses come ashore on stolid British beaches to feast on human flesh? What was seen worshiping in the depths of the ocean abyss? How did the crystal egg arrive in the shop, and where is it now? We know only what was seen, and that, in its way, is convincing.

There is an old saw that in a short story one thing happens. Wells’s short stories exemplify this. His writing is effective: as good as it needs to be, with little in the way of grace notes. Still, the best are haunting in their implications.

All too often they are tales of failed revelation. In Wells’s world the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not eaten – not because of fear or difficulty, but because of embarrassment – and over and again knowledge or something equally as magical (the secret of making diamonds, an egg that shows us life on Mars, the formula for invisibility) is lost to the world. At the end of many of these stories the world is unchanged, and yet it could have been changed utterly and irrevocably.

The most successful Wells short stories are not what we today would view as stories. They are anecdotes and journalism: carnivorous octopuses come, eat and return to the English Channel in a tale that feels like an article from a turn-of-the-century scientific paper, while the ants, armed with poison, conclude their tale 50 years away from arriving in Europe (in those slow, comfortable days before container ship and jet plane). It’s not a weakness – indeed, it’s where these stories derive a significant amount of their power and effect.

Still, by today’s standards (and those of the time Wells was writing) this was not on. They were not proper short stories – a criticism that Wells took to heart in his 1911 introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, when he says that “we suffered then, as now, from the a priori critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful, but ‘it isn’t a play,’ so we had a great deal of talk about the short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary standards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any one of courage and imagination can get told in 20 minutes’ reading or so. It was either Mr Edward Garnett or Mr George Moore in a violently anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story and the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable.”

Wells seems painfully aware that many of his most effective short stories were not explorations of character and event, and was uncomfortable with this. He need not have been. They work because they lack, sometimes, plot, often, character. What they have instead is brevity and conviction. The world of the finest of Wells’s short stories is one of possibilities, of breakthrough in science or society or of the unknown which change the world.

The stories, particularly the more fantastic of them, are most easily read as if they were postcards from an alternate future that is already past. Many of these stories are about futures and changes that have long since been carried away by time and memory: it is hard to remain cutting edge, well over a century after the stories were written.

Wells described the art of the short story as the jolly art of making something very bright and moving; “it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from 15 to 50 minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention and imagination and the mood can give – a vision of buttered slides on a busy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous expectation these stories should be received.”

And that suggestion holds as true now as when he wrote it.

There are few enough writers in any field whose short stories will be read 100 years after they were written. Science fiction in particular has a short enough sell-by date, one that only the finest writers surpass. While Ray Bradbury’s Martian short stories transcend our knowledge that there are no canals and no atmosphere, too many near-future tales from too many fine authors were overtaken by events and became, simply, redundant. H. G. Wells’s stories are still readable, and can 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 . . .”

Of all the things one can say about his stories, to my mind unquestionably the best is this: long after they were written, they live.

© Neil Gaiman 2007

This is an edited version of the introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, published by Penguin Classics (June 14) at £9.99, offer £9.49 inc p&p from 0870 1608080

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