The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents

First published in 1895, The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents gathers H. G. Wells's early short fiction into a brisk gallery of scientific pranks, urban nightmares, and moral inversions. Its title story, in which an anarchist mistakes a harmless culture for a weapon of plague, typifies Wells's method: speculative premise, comic velocity, and a disquieting awareness of modern science's social consequences. Written in the fin-de-siècle context of bacteriology, imperial anxiety, and popular magazine fiction, these tales mix satire, Gothic unease, and proto-science fiction with lucid, economical prose. Wells's authority in these pieces derives from his unusual formation. Trained in biology under T. H. Huxley and shaped by lower-middle-class insecurity, illness, teaching, journalism, and socialist debate, he understood both scientific discovery and the precarious society receiving it. Before his major scientific romances made him famous, he used the short story as a laboratory for ideas, testing how ordinary clerks, doctors, inventors, and eccentrics behave when confronted by unstable knowledge. This collection is recommended to readers interested in the origins of modern speculative fiction, but also to admirers of sharp social comedy. Compact yet intellectually provocative, it shows Wells discovering the narrative instruments that would animate The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, while preserving the freshness of brief, unsettling incidents.