2336, TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM. +Macmillan; London, 1903. Scribner; New York, 1905.
Short stories, including
[a] Filmer. (The Graphic, Christmas Number, 1901) The final conquest of the air in 1907, told as a personality study. Filmer, a grubby little man, has solved the problem of flight by combining aspects of lighter and heavier than air flying machines. His solution involves expansible gas bags that can slide into the hollow framework of his apparatus. (Wells does not consider a propelling mechanism except for gliding from higher to lower levels.) He scrimps and saves to build a small wireless-controlled model, and when this is successful, a full-sized apparatus. Filmer is scheduled to fly the machine, but he withdraws and commits suicide. It is not clear from the text whether he was afraid of flying or failure,
[b] The Truth about Pyecraft. (The Strand Magazine, April 1903) Club life and the dangers of speaking loosely. Pyecraft, who is greatly overweight, approaches the narrator, whose great grandmother was a Hindu "wise woman," and asks him for a recipe for losing weight. The old woman had left a store of highly efficacious remedies for such conditions. Pyecraft follows instructions. He does not seem to be getting slimmer, but he is literally losing weight, and is soon lighter than air. Lead ballast sewn into his clothing holds him down.
* Told as humor.
[c] The New Accelerator. ( The Strand Magazine, December 1901) Time stopped still. Professor Gibberne has discovered a chemical that speeds up metabolism enormously, some thousands of times. He and the narrator take the chemical experimentally and wander out into a world where almost everything seems motionless. A dropped glass stays fixed in the air; a bee flaps along as slowly as a snail; men and women stand about like statues. The only effect that the neometabolists feel is heat, for the rapidity of their motion generates enough heat to char their clothing. The preparation will soon be on the market.
[d] A Dream of Armageddon. The stranger in the railroad carriage tells of his sequential dreams of the future. The date of his dream experience is not stated, but the culture described is much like that of When the Sleeper Wakes and "A Story of the Days to Come," thus, probably, the twenty-first or twenty-second century.
* In this future world efficient flying machines and pleasure cities for the wealthy are preeminent. The narrator in his dream is one of the political bosses of the north, but he has abandoned his position and responsibilities in order to stay with his mistress in Italy. He refuses to return even though he knows that party strife and war may result from his absence.
* The war breaks out, airships bombard Italy, and the narrator and his mistress are killed. While Wells is not precise, the situation seems to involve an invasion of the west by Orientals.
* [a] and [b] are minor; [c] is a well-imagined investigation of an important motif, enlivened by an ironic touch; [d] lacks the clarity one usually expects from Wells.
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