Author(s): H. G. Wells

Classic Fiction | Secondhand | Folio Society

Secondhand. Illustrated by Jonathan Hitchen.

It is typical of H G Wells’s seductive blend of the everyday and the exotic that, in ‘The Argonauts of the Air’, the hero Monson constructs his amazing flying machine beside the Southern Railway between Wimbledon and Worcester Park. The more ordinary the man labouring in the laboratory, or tending the blast furnace, or walking to work through the streets of London, the more extraordinary the adventure that will undoubtedly befall him. It is hard for us to imagine the havoc that might be wrought if a stollen bacillus were released into the water supply by an anarchist; or the carnage that might result should an army of intelligent ants begin to build an empire; or the strange terrors that might afflict a man who can see in the country of the blind. But for H G Wells such possibilities were the stuff of romance and many years later his imagination seems frighteningly prophetic: machines take on a malignant life of their own; plants and animals develop man-eating tendencies, and man himself becomes the victim of circumstances often exotically beyond his control. These are the tales of the unexpected; and, comic or tragic, the end of each one invariably takes the reader by surprise.

Taken from the collection published by J. M. Dent & Sons in 1927.

VG in good slipcase. Minor foxing on some pages, and a light bump on the spine.