The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents

About the book

A laboratory visitor's interest in a dangerous specimen sets the title story moving, but this collection ranges well beyond one kind of scientific mishap. Strange plants, an observatory, a would-be maker of diamonds, unfamiliar animals, and a taxidermist's inventions supply different occasions for curiosity to become alarm or comedy. Wells frequently gives his narrators and investigators enough knowledge to recognise a puzzle without enough to control it. Ambition, acquisitiveness, professional pride, and casual misunderstanding help extraordinary incidents develop from recognisable motives. The stories' compactness makes a detail or late clarification capable of changing the whole account. Together they show an early Wells interested in the social circumstances of discovery as well as its spectacle, especially in the uses people imagine for knowledge before they understand its implications.

• Curiosity
• Ambition
• Knowledge and uncertainty

Why read it

For inventive short fiction in which scientific strangeness finds ready partners in ordinary vanity, greed, and misunderstanding.

Story collection · English text