Short Stacks #5 // H.G. Wells Edition // #scifimonth

It is already time for the fifth short stacks where I focus on novella’s and the like that I have read over time that I haven’t done a seperate review for but still want to give some attention.

As it is sci-fi month I decided to collect a few of H.G. Wells works I’ve read over the last few years.

Title: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Release Date: 1895
Type: Novella

Interesting to read a book published in 1895 that is clearly a science-fiction story. There are a lot of interesting things about it, but I struggled a bit with how it was told. We have one narrator in first point of view, but most of the story is the time traveller telling about his time travel stories as our narrator hears it. I sturggled a bit with that because while the time traveller was interesting when interacting with others, he mostly had himself in what he told about his time travels. The theories and what he compared to certain things were a little lost on me. They just went a bit too far I guess. The last third of the book was better though as there was quite a bit more action present.

Title: The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Release Date: 1895
Type: Novella

This was a bit of a disturbing story that is quite a bit more memorable than The Time Machine. But it is also the disturbing nature that never made me love it as I feel there was never any nuance. There was nothing to like about the characters and there were a few gaps in plot. On the other hand the questions regarding human nature is an interesting one.

Title: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Release Date: 1898
Type: Novella

This was a lot more interesting than The Time Machine and certainly better set up. But it very much suffered from an uninteresting main character and a bit of a dragging plot in the middle. Still seeing aliens, robots and similair technology as that now is used in alien movies at the time of writing this, is quite a marvel.

Title: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
Release Date: 1897
Type: Novella

I think The Invisible Man will be known by many for the 90s movie. Even if you don’t know the movie it is not hard to guess what this novella is about. There is some science in the last 25% but most of the story is about what it does to a person. We follow a scientiest who has discovered the impossible, how to become invisible. However there is a certain effect on his personality that starts to show quite quickly. It was interesting but as most books by Wells this suffers from characters I don’t care about and it becomes much harder to become invested in these kind of stories.

Pages counts are calculated based on aprox. 250 words a page. Especially that last one cut off at 180 pages is iffy at best. Some novella’s are over 200 pages. But this is just meant as a guideline.