'You laid hands on almost anything that came handy, a droning dynamo, a fluttering bat, a bacteriologist's tube. In 1939, in his discussion of his revision of what is probably his finest story, 'The Country of the Blind,' he says he had lost his tolerance for the idea story, the gimmick, the trick ending - the potboiler he had written so many of. ' He was surely right to do so but his own almost patronising description of it as 'this compact and amusing form' hardly includes Henry James's, or Kipling's, or his own best stories, though it describes the lesser ones very well. 'I refuse altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund,' he wrote. 'I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Wells could not be comfortable with that. Maupassant's bleak, tight, neat tales were the accepted model. Chekhov had not yet been translated, to show the limitless possibilities of the form. Citing the work of Kipling, Henry James, Conrad, and many others, he calls the 1890's the high point of the short story and speaks of 'lyrical brevity and a vivid finish' as its virtues. Introducing his own selection of his short stories, ( The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, 1913) he discusses the form and his relation to it. His interest in society and psychology and his high literary standards, however, led him away from such a narrow focus on idea-driven plot. There are memorable stories to support this view, and Wells wrote several of them. Some students of science fiction insist that its particular quality depends on its ideas alone, so that attention to literary considerations apart from clarity and narrative drive, or to character as opposed to stereotype, merely weakens or dilutes it.

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Selected stories of hg wells