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 u...