The Sleeper Awakes

The book that gave the world both the phrase and the idea. A Victorian inventor travels forward to the year 802,701 and finds humanity split into two species, one of which eats the other.

H. G. Wells

An angel falls out of the sky into an English village and is promptly shot by the local vicar. Wells uses the visitor's confusion to take apart the manners and cruelties of country life.

H. G. Wells

A shipwrecked man washes up on an island where a disgraced surgeon is carving animals into something close to human. One of the earliest and darkest fictional treatments of biological engineering.

H. G. Wells

A scientist discovers how to make himself invisible and then cannot reverse it. What starts as a technical triumph turns into a study of what a person does once nobody can see him.

H. G. Wells

Martian cylinders land in the English countryside and the most powerful empire on earth discovers it is defenceless. The novel that invented alien invasion as a genre and still sets its terms.

H. G. Wells