The Empire of the Ants and Other Stories

’Very thin indeed is the curtain between us and the unknown’

The short stories of H. G. Wells are about many things, but they are nearly always about contact between the extraordinary and the everyday. There are few mighty statesmen or square-jawed heroes in his writing--it’s a junior teaching assistant--who ends up being handed the fruit of the tree of knowledge in a railway carriage, a domestic housekeeper who must save a botanist from a murderous orchid, and a Lancashire engineer who ends up, high in the Amazon, witnessing the rise of an empire of insects. Even in Wells’s non-fantastic stories, people are propelled out of their elements, forced to reckon with their place in the world--or that of humanity at large.
Wells is best-known today for his science fiction novels and his prophetic writings, but he began his career as a journalist and wrote an extraordinary number of tales, sketches, and thought-experiments, forty of which are collected here. This edition contains many acknowledged classics, but also collects some of the less celebrated gems found in the pages of the magazines and newspapers in which Wells learned his craft. This book contains text based on the stories’ first magazine appearances, with an introduction, commentary, and notes on the periodicals for which Wells wrote.

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H. G. Wells

Will Tattersdill is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Fantasy Cultures at Glasgow University. He writes and teaches about print culture, dinosaurs, alternate history, Star Trek, museums, choose-your-own adventures, and the relationship between literature and science. He is the author of Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (2016).