About the author

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.

During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption – dubbed “Wells’s law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK) in 1934.

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The Purple Pileus

When unassuming shopkeeper, Mr Coombes, decides to end his melancholic life, he eats what he believes to be a poisonous mushroom: the 'Purple Pileus' of the title. However, Mr Coombes is mistaken in his choice and, instead, ingests a fungus with powerful hallucinatory properties. In the grip of a psychedelic fever, the shopkeeper decides it’s time for a change. One of Wells’ short stories, this intriguing tale was adapted for television in 2016, featuring Leanne Best and Ray Winstone. HG Wells (1866 – 1946) was a prolific writer and the author of more than 50 novels. In addition, we wrote more than 60 short stories, alongside various scientific papers. Many of his most famous works have been adapted for film and television, including ‘The Time Machine,’ starring Guy Pearce, ‘War of the Worlds,’ starring Tom Cruise, and ‘The Invisible Man,’ starring Elizabeth Moss. Because of his various works exploring futuristic themes, Wells is regarded as one of the ‘Fathers of Science Fiction.’
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Edition
Printed pages28 Sider
Publish date02 Jun 2022
Published bySAGA Egmont
Languageeng
ISBN epub9788728293331