Twelve Stories and a Dream

H.G. Wells is remembered as the prophet of sci-fi's darkest futures, but this collection reveals another Wells entirely: playful, weird, and wickedly funny. Twelve Stories and a Dream collects the master's lesser-known short fiction, where the impossible becomes strangely intimate. A bored clerk stumbles into fairyland and finds a queen who wants to make him hers forever, body and soul. A ghost gets tragically stranded between worlds, unable to move on or fully return. A man with a God complex decides to conduct a celestial experiment on his own terms. A shady shopkeeper vends bottled time to anyone desperate enough to buy it. And the final story asks the question that haunts the entire collection: how do you know you're not dreaming right now? These aren't grand apocalyptic visions. They're small, strange studies of desire, mortality, and what happens when reality develops cracks. Wells writes with the gentle malice of someone who knows that the most terrifying things aren't monsters, but the questions we can't answer.