Wells’s five scientific romances here were published between 1895 and 1904, at the moment when the genre was being invented, and they are noticeably shorter than the novels around them.
The Time Machine came first, and at 32,223 words it is still the cleanest demonstration of the method: one impossible premise, followed to its logical end.
Wells’s five scientific romances here were published between 1895 and 1904, the decade in which he set down most of the situations later science fiction reuses: time travel, invisibility, alien invasion, biological engineering, and an island where evolution is run as an experiment. He was a trained biologist writing for a mass readership, and the books are arguments wearing plots.
The Time Machine is 32,223 words, under two hours, and The War of the Worlds 61,000. Read in publication order you can hear him getting angrier: the early books are thought experiments about what might happen, the later ones are complaints about what people will do with power once they have it. The Food of the Gods, the last here, is the least read and the most openly political.
Start here: The Time Machine. It takes about two hours, and it establishes the two things Wells does better than his contemporaries: the sweep of deep time and the sting in the last chapter.
H. G. Wells: which book first
Every H. G. Wells title on editions.ink, with the reading time for each. The first row is the one to start with.
| Book | Year | Words | Read time |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Time Machine — start here | 1895 | 32,223 | 2 h |
| The Island of Doctor Moreau | 1896 | 46,593 | 3 h |
| The Invisible Man | 1897 | 49,000 | 3 h |
| The War of the Worlds | 1898 | 61,000 | 3 h |
| The Food of the Gods | 1904 | 74,000 | 4 h |
| All five | 262,816 | 15 h |
What to read after the first one
- The War of the Worlds — the most famous, and the one that has been adapted most often
- The Invisible Man — the tightest plot of the five, and the nastiest
If you would rather see the whole shelf in chronological order first, the H. G. Wells books in order page lists every title by publication year with the same word counts. The H. G. Wells author page collects all the editions in one place,, and the author index has the other writers on the site. If you want a follow-up by a different author, the read next guide pairs ten classics with what to read after them.
Questions readers ask
Which H. G. Wells book should I read first?
The Time Machine (1895, 32,223 words, about two hours). It is the shortest and the one that sets up the rest.
Are the Wells books connected?
No, they are separate stories, though they share the same late-Victorian scientific optimism and the same habit of taking one idea too far.
Are these Wells editions free?
Yes, free DRM-free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files.