HG Wells Books in Order

Wells’s letters from 1919 to 1934 trace his personal relationships and public life through correspondence with friends, family, and professional contacts. Gathered from numerous archives, they reveal concerns and exchanges beyond the published fiction.

Wells’s letters from 1934 to 1946 trace his personal relationships and public life through correspondence with friends, family, and professional contacts. Gathered from numerous archives, they reveal concerns and exchanges beyond the published fiction.

This collection brings together Wells's essays and articles originally written for newspapers and magazines. Addressing politics, science, and social questions, it shows how his journalism engaged with the debates and changing conditions of the early twentieth century.

Two late works bring together Wells's reflections on time and his escape into dreams amid wartime destruction. Philosophical questions about existence sit alongside imagined encounters with supernatural beings in a world freed from ordinary earthly constraints.

Wells explains games played with miniature armies and improvised landscapes on the floor, combining practical rules with accounts of imaginative play. The paired works explore how simple toys can support both strategic contests and shared creative adventures.

Two travelers encounter an imagined world organized according to a different set of social institutions. Moving between narrative and discussion, Wells considers government, work, property, individual freedom, and the tensions involved in designing a society intended to keep changing.

Wells presents a concise narrative extending from life and human origins to the civilizations and conflicts of his own era. The survey connects religion, politics, technology, and social change within an early twentieth-century attempt to tell a shared human story.

Ann Veronica challenges her father’s expectations and leaves home in pursuit of greater independence. Education, work, political activity, and personal relationships test what freedom can mean for a young woman negotiating the social and financial limits around her.

Wells speculates about how scientific and mechanical advances could reshape human life in the twentieth century. His forecasts consider transport, warfare, social organization, and personal relationships, examining the possibilities and pressures created by rapidly changing technology.

Wells recounts his childhood, education, financial struggles, relationships with work, and development as a writer and public thinker. The autobiography moves from personal memories into reflections on society, knowledge, and the purposes he believed his life and writing could serve.

A discontented young man recalls life in a divided industrial society as a comet approaches Earth. Personal anger, romantic expectations, and public tensions form the setting for a speculative story about the possibility of altered perception and social change.

Arthur Kipps moves from schooling and apprenticeship into unexpected wealth. His efforts to fit a new social position complicate relationships and ambitions, allowing Wells to examine class, confidence, and the distance between learning manners and finding a satisfying life.

A group of people from contemporary England are transported into a parallel world whose society has developed along different lines. Their encounters with its inhabitants expose conflicting ideas about freedom, knowledge, authority, and the habits they have brought with them.

Arnold Blettsworthy’s disillusionment with his familiar world leads into a strange island narrative. Wells combines adventure conventions with uncertainty and social criticism, using the unfamiliar setting to question the distinction between civilized behavior and the violence concealed within modern society.

A mountaineer reaches a community where blindness has shaped daily life over generations. Expecting his sight to give him an advantage, he encounters a society organized around different assumptions, creating a conflict over knowledge, belonging, and the meaning of ability.

Scientists Bensington and Redwood create a substance that accelerates growth, then test it on farm animals and human children. When their experiments escape control, giant creatures and children challenge a society unprepared for the changes they bring.

Alfred Polly struggles with an unhappy marriage, an unsuccessful shop, and the limitations of his expectations. The novel follows his attempts to change a life that feels trapped, combining social observation, comedy, and questions about what makes ordinary existence bearable.

Richard Remington looks back on his development as a political thinker and public figure. His commitments to reform become entangled with dissatisfaction in marriage and a new relationship, bringing intellectual ambition into conflict with private choices and social expectations.

Presented as a history written from the future, the book imagines global conflict, social breakdown, and attempts to reconstruct civilization. Wells uses the speculative chronicle to consider world government, scientific authority, education, and the institutions he believed progress required.

A Victorian inventor travels into Earth's distant future, finding a world whose inhabitants seem to have escaped human struggle. His investigation of their divided society turns the journey into a question about civilization's direction.

A young Englishman becomes caught up in an international conflict shaped by new aerial technology. Through his encounters with military power and civilian vulnerability, Wells imagines how expanded mobility and destructive capacity might change warfare and the stability of societies.

Wells imagines a world transformed by the discovery of a powerful new energy source and its use in warfare. The speculative history considers technological destruction and political reconstruction, asking what forms of organization might emerge when existing institutions become inadequate.

George Ponderevo helps his uncle market Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine whose success depends on promotion rather than genuine value. Their growing business draws him into wealth, class aspiration, and shifting relationships, connecting personal ambition with a wider commercial culture.