Here's something I've been looking forward to: the first free ebook recommendation.

H.G. Wells was not only a founding figure in the creation of the genre of science fiction; he created plots which have continued to define the genre to this day. "The War of the Worlds", "The Time Machine", "The Invisible Man", "The Island of Doctor Moreau" are just a •few• of Wells' genre-defining novels.

Which makes it easy to overlook the many brilliant short stories he produced during his career, covering horror, humor, fantasy, science fiction, and more.

My introduction to Wells was a purple hardcover book that I found among the family books when I was a child: "Thirty Strange Stories". It mesmerized me. Although the stories are more than 100 years old now, they felt remarkably modern and relevant.

Sadly that book is long out of print, but Standard Ebooks has created a free eBook that has virtually all the same stories. It's called "Short Fiction, by H. G. Wells" and it's available in all the major eBook formats. It includes 55 of his classic short stories, and they're incredibly readable!

standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-…

There are stories here which will stay with you forever. "The Stolen Bacillus", "The Treasure In the Forest", "The Lord of the Dynamos", "The Cone", "Under the Knife", "The Truth About Pyecraft"...there are just too many amazing, gripping stories to list them all. The sheer •flexibility• that Wells demonstrates is astounding. He'll have you terrified one moment, laughing the next, and crying the moment after that.

And it's free. What more could you ask for?

Happy reading! 🤓📖

"A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out a disloyal partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to leave her means to join the unemployed in some strange part of the Earth. The luxuries of divorce are beyond him altogether. So that the good old tradition of marriage for better or worse holds inexorably for him, and things work up to tragic culminations. Bricklayers kick their wives to death, and dukes betray theirs; but it is among the small clerks and shopkeepers nowadays that it comes most often to a cutting of throats."

- "The Purple Pileus"

#Books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #Horror #Humor #English #FreeEbooks #QuasitBookRecs