The best HG Wells books

This is the tale of Charles Marden, an apple grower and judge who sets off from his Vancouver Island home on an impulsive journey to Belgium, where his son, an Allied soldier in the First World War, has just died in battle at the very end of the war. Marden's single-minded mission: finding the exact spot where his son was killed.

Across western Canada the Spanish flu rages—the very disease that claimed Marden's wife three weeks earlier. Upon arriving in England, he learns that his son left behind a pregnant girlfriend. Soon his search widens to include locating the girl, too. Nearing the front lines, Marden seems to descend into the fires of hell as he navigates the mine-strewn killing fields of the trenches, still reeking with poison gas. Will he find the girl, and will he find an answer to the forces that drove him halfway around the world?

A New England-born author and journalist describes his nine-month, ten-thousand-mile journey through Australia by bicycle, detailing the cattle stations, mining towns, Aboriginal communities, rain forests, deserts, and other sights of the Australian Outback.

A dark biopunk thriller of gothic proportions. Solari wasn’t alive when the radiation rained down, but she’s living with the consequences—the mutations, the gangland war, and the wall that divides Tasmania’s affluent North from its contaminated South. Alone in the southern reaches, Solari survives by cooking wildly addictive snowrock for the local crime lord and avoiding the city’s mutants. 

But, when a bad deal turns worse, Solari is forced to run—escaping retribution with a stolen van and a pair of giant wings cleaved from a mutant moth. Grafting the wings to her body will disguise Solari as one of Tasmania’s most reviled, and set her on a dangerous journey through gangland strongholds to get to the Border Wall, and safety, in the north.

Princess Meredith’s 18th birthday is fast approaching, but unlike other girls, she is not looking forward to it. Upon her coming of age, she is to marry the prince of Alder, the most powerful kingdom in the world. Though the idea of marriage to a complete stranger is appalling, she knows she has no choice. Without the marriage contract, Stonefall’s alliance with Alder will be lost, and her people will be safe no longer; Theros, King of Talos, has set his eyes of conquest on Stonefall and he wants Meredith dead.

Connor, an elite soldier entrusted with Meredith’s safety, arrives at the palace just as things begin to take a turn for the worst. Together, they will embark on a journey of survival, in which Meredith will find that the only thing she never prepared for was falling in love.

The argument rages: did Dune influence Star Wars and if so, how much? Or was the primary influence on Star Wars the Flash Gordon movie serial? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? The question is moot, since the granddaddy of them all was the Lensman series of novels.

The first of these, Triplanetary, appeared in the Jan-April 1934 issues of Amazing Stories. It’s all there: multiple intelligent alien species, an evil empire bent on galactic domination, people with heightened mental abilities, gigantic battles in space; all set against a vast galactic background. The science is primitive and so are some of the characters, but the action and scope carries you along. When much of science fiction was struggling to tell stories inside the solar system, Smith was ranging across the entire galaxy. Adjusted and fixed up, all six of the main Lensman novels are still readily available—and for a reason.

Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels, and film. John Wyndham’s triffids, Algernon Blackwood’s willows, and Han Kang’s sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant life are driven, as are many threads of science-fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today.

Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction. Its original essays argue that plant life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large; erecting – and dismantling – new visions of utopian and dystopian futures. 

Get your own back. Out on Top is a bag of stories where wrongs are often put right. Instead of dwelling on what might have been, characters get their chances to rectify their regrets and scores are sometimes slyly settled.

Ezekiel’s Brain is a story of a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) that goes rogue and exterminates the human race. Two hundred years later, AIs have replaced humans and are exploring the universe, but a malignant AI mutation leads to an intra-galactic war that can only be won by resurrecting Ezekiel, an electronic copy of a human brain.

This is hard science fiction with a philosophical twist. What begins as an earth-bound thriller about a mysterious government agency trying to weaponize a powerful AI, becomes the beginning of a new race of machines who send a crew of AIs off to the far reaches of space. The first book in the Voyages of the Delphi series features the next step in the evolution of intelligence—from human to machine.

After the body of a man is found mysteriously burned to death in his home, Northumbria Police know there is only one person they can call on to help; fire Investigator Ian Fenwick, a man fighting his own demons. Fenwick soon finds himself pitched against crazed killers and mysterious entities known only as The Visitors. Can Fenwick stop them from carrying out their mission? If not, the whole world will burn.

Producers and audiences are hungrier than ever for stories, and a lot of those stories begin life as a book – but how exactly do you transfer a story from the page to the screen? Do adaptations use the same creative gears as original screenplays? Does a true story give a project more weight than a fictional one? Is it helpful to have the original author’s input on the script? And how much pressure is the screenwriter under, knowing they won’t be able to please everyone with the finished product?

The Art of Screen Adaptation reveals the challenges and pleasures of reimagining stories for cinema and television, and provides a frank and fascinating masterclass with the writers who have done it – and have the awards and acclaim to show for it.