Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
The title story alone justifies this collection: a mountaineer stumbles into a hidden valley where generations have lived in darkness, and finds himself the only one who can see. The locals consider him deformed, insane, dangerous - perhaps even evil - because he insists on something they cannot imagine and have no word for. It's a masterpiece of inverted perspective, a fable about what it means to be different when different is synonymous with mad. The other stories range across Wells's peculiar imaginative territory: a man who discovers he is the last person on Earth, a shopkeeper who finds his stolen goods appearing in his own cellar, a scientist whose experiment goes terribly right. Some are science fiction; others are something stranger - ghost stories without ghosts, fables of ordinary life turned subtly wrong. Wells wrote these with evident pleasure, and that pleasure is infectious. The collection reveals a writer less interested in gadgets than in the elastic nature of reality and the blindness we all carry within us.
X-Ray
