Early writings on science and science fiction by H. G. Wells

ROBERT PHILMUS and DAVID Y. HUGHES (editors), Early writings on science and science fiction by H. G. Wells, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, University of California Press, 1975, 8vo, pp. xiv, 249, £10.00. The editors' purpose is to bring together twenty-eight essays from H. G. Wells' hitherto unreprinted writings of the 1880s and 1890s, which are concerned with science and science fiction. There is also an annotated, selective bibliography of his science journalism, 1887 to 1901, which includes the selections. There is a useful introduction and explanatory footnotes to Wells' text. In view of the fact that these pieces, which are essays, reviews, and fiction, are scattered through a variety of publications and that some appeared anonymously or pseudonymously, this is a most valuable anthology. Together they provide an outline to Wells' intellectual development, for they are grouped according to relationships rather than in purely chronological sequence. They will, as the editors hope, clarify H. G. Wells' vision of "the poetry of science".