The Door in the Wall And Other Stories

The Door in the Wall And Other Stories — H. G. Wells — The Door in the Wall And Other Stories is book by English writer H. G. Wells, first published in 1911. It is a collection of short science fiction and fantasy stories. The stories included in this book are: The Door in the Wall (the story of a man who carries a memory since childhood of entering a door in the garden that opened up to a magical place); The Star (an apocalyptic story about a strange luminous object erupting into the Solar System); A Dream of Armageddon (a story about a man plagued by dreams of war and catastrophe); The Cone (a story about a man who takes his wife's lover on a tour of his iron factory); A Moonlight Fable (also published under the title 'The Beautiful Suit', it is the tale of a mother who makes a suit for her son, who tires of the restrictions set by her, as to when he can wear it); The Diamond Maker (the story of a man who has devoted his years to making synthetic diamonds); The Lord of the Dynamos (the story of a racist whose bullying of an asian man leads to his own demise); and, The Country of the Blind (the story of a man who finds himself in a country where the people have no sight).

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 — 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the “father of science fiction.

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”, while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a “wild talent”.

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work — 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), which was his first novel, 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.