Tales of Space and Time

Five tales carry the imagination far. A great white star blazes over a London dawn while crowds cheer "It is brighter!" Then an observatory whisper turns the cheer to dread: "It is nearer." Fifty thousand years back, the fleet-footed Eudena flees her tribe and the terror of the woodshade, and the youth Ugh-lomi, marked for death, stumbles toward the first hafted axe. Far ahead, in a London of moving streets and blazing advertisements, a flying-stage attendant named Denton loses the woman he loves to a hypnotist's cruelty. And a skeptical everyman, George McWhirter Fotheringay, discovers he can work miracles by will alone.

Wells writes across vast reaches of time yet keeps returning to the small human beat inside the cosmic one. The collection moves through a drowning world and a fetched shawl and lets them carry equal weight. A sleepless mathematician, calculating the end, holds his ground: "But I can hold you—and all the universe for that matter—in the grip of this little brain."

How large the universe is, and how small a catastrophe looks from a few million miles off—and how a single frightened person, staring into a crystal or up at the stars, still matters. The door is open. Step in and look.