Herbert George Wells invented most of what science fiction has argued about ever since. These 41 free H. G. Wells books cover all of it, from time travel and alien invasion to genetic experiments and atomic war.
Wells was born in England in 1866, worked as a draper's apprentice, and never stopped writing until he died in 1946. He wrote far more than the four novels everyone remembers, adding comic stories about shop clerks, short story collections, and a world history that outsold all his fiction.
Start with the scientific romances if you want the Wells people quote. Then read Kipps or Tono-Bungay and meet the writer his contemporaries actually argued with.
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Science Fiction
H. G. Wells Science Fiction Books
These are the free H. G. Wells books that built the genre, written between 1895 and 1914. The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Food of the Gods turned evolution, imperialism and new technology into stories anyone could read.
The book that gave the world both the phrase and the idea. A Victorian inventor travels forward to the year 802,701 and finds humanity split into two species, one of which eats the other.
An angel falls out of the sky into an English village and is promptly shot by the local vicar. Wells uses the visitor's confusion to take apart the manners and cruelties of country life.
A shipwrecked man washes up on an island where a disgraced surgeon is carving animals into something close to human. One of the earliest and darkest fictional treatments of biological engineering.
A scientist discovers how to make himself invisible and then cannot reverse it. What starts as a technical triumph turns into a study of what a person does once nobody can see him.
Martian cylinders land in the English countryside and the most powerful empire on earth discovers it is defenceless. The novel that invented alien invasion as a genre and still sets its terms.
A man falls asleep in 1897 and wakes two centuries later to find that compound interest has made him owner of the world. Published first as When the Sleeper Wakes and revised by Wells in 1910.
A businessman and a physicist reach the moon in a sphere coated with a gravity blocking compound, and find a civilization living inside it. Wells at his most inventive about how an alien society might actually be organized.
A mermaid comes ashore on the south coast of England and sets about wrecking a respectable engagement. A lighter, sharper Wells, using the fantastic to needle Edwardian propriety.
Two scientists invent a substance that makes everything that eats it grow enormous, and then lose control of it. The result is giant wasps, giant children, and a country that cannot decide what to do about either.
A young man consumed by jealousy and class resentment is interrupted by a comet whose gases change human nature overnight. Wells uses the device to argue for the society he thought was possible.
Written five years after the first powered flight, this imagines fleets of airships destroying cities and collapsing the world economy. Much of what Wells describes here happened within his lifetime.
Wells names the atomic bomb three decades before one existed, and imagines a war fought with weapons that keep burning for years. The physicist Leo Szilard read it and started thinking about chain reactions.
Wells thought these were his real work. Comic, angry and very Edwardian, his novels follow shop assistants, science students and unhappy wives through a Britain where class and social inequality were shifting fast.
A draper's assistant takes a cycling holiday and collides, literally, with a young woman running away from home. A comic road novel drawn straight from the shop counter Wells escaped.
A poor science student maps out his whole career on a schedule pinned to the wall, and then falls in love. The first novel where Wells wrote about his own life rather than the future.
A shop assistant inherits a fortune and discovers that money does not come with instructions for how to behave. Wells thought this was the best thing he ever wrote.
A worthless patent medicine is turned into a national fortune by advertising alone. The most ambitious of Wells' realist novels and a still accurate account of how commercial bubbles work.
A young woman walks out of her father's house to study biology and live on her own terms. The book was denounced from pulpits and banned from libraries when it appeared.
A miserable shopkeeper decides to burn down his shop and walk away from his life. Wells' funniest novel, and the one that most clearly says what he thought of respectable failure.
A rising politician wrecks his career over an affair and writes the whole thing down from exile. A roman a clef close enough to real people that publishers refused it.
A scientist gives up research for money and marriage, then tries to work out what he lost. Wells argues here that the Edwardian household was built to consume its members.
A boy runs away from his first job in a great house and spends the book being chased across England. Broad, fast comedy with a hard edge about servants and their masters.
A satire on the literary world published under the invented name Reginald Bliss, with Wells listed only as its editor. Its attack on Henry James ended their friendship.
The First World War as it reached an English village and an English family, written while it was still being fought. It was the bestselling novel of its year on both sides of the Atlantic.
Wells wrote more than eighty short stories, and his storytelling is often sharper here than in the novels. Tales of Space and Time, The Country of the Blind and The Door in the Wall are the ones readers keep returning to.
Wells' first short story collection, fifteen pieces written while he was still making his name. Anarchists with test tubes, carnivorous orchids and a man who steals a comet, all in a few pages each.
Seventeen stories about people who cross into somewhere they should not be. A schoolmaster blown into a parallel world, a diving bell that reaches a city on the sea floor, and a man who trades bodies with a stranger.
Three long stories and two short ones, ranging from the stone age to a future city of thirty million people. Includes A Story of the Days To Come, the closest Wells came to writing cyberpunk.
Thirteen stories that lean comic more often than not. A shop where the magic is real, a drug that speeds you up until the world stops, and a ghost who cannot remember how to leave.
Thirty-three stories that Wells selected himself as the ones worth keeping, with his own introduction explaining how he wrote them. The single best entry point to his short fiction.
Eight stories built around the moment something impossible opens up in an ordinary life. The title story, about a green door that appears only when its finder cannot afford to walk through it, is the one people remember.
The Outline of History sold more copies than every Wells novel combined. He spent the second half of his career writing about technology, society and the future of humanity rather than inventing it.
Wells' first non-fiction book, forecasting what mechanical transport would do to cities, class and war. He got the sprawling suburb and the armoured vehicle right decades early.
A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution arguing that the future can be studied as rigorously as the past. Short, and the clearest statement of why Wells wrote what he wrote.
Half novel and half argument, this imagines a planet identical to Earth except that it is organized properly, then interrogates its own design. Wells' most detailed political blueprint.
A short socialist pamphlet that argues its whole case through the state of people's shoes. Fifteen pages, and the most direct piece of political writing Wells produced.
Wells sets out his own working philosophy, from what he thinks can be known to how he thinks a person should live. Written as a personal statement rather than a system.
A short and cheerful account of the games Wells played on the nursery floor with his sons, using bricks, boards and toy soldiers. It led directly to his rules for tabletop wargaming.
Written in the middle of the war, this sets out a personal religion with no church and no creator behind it. Wells later disowned the book, which makes it the most revealing thing he wrote about himself.
The whole story of life and humanity in one volume, from the formation of the planet to the end of the First World War. It outsold every novel Wells wrote and made him a household name as a historian.
The condensed version of The Outline of History, written for readers who wanted the whole sweep in an afternoon. Still one of the most readable single volume world histories.
Wells died in 1946, the year after the atomic bomb he had described in 1914 was actually used. He spent fifty years telling people what was coming, and was right often enough that reading him now feels less like fiction and more like a briefing.
Every title on this page is in the public domain, so you can read it online or download it at no cost. Browse more writers like him in our classic authors collection.
