This bulky volume, nearly 700 pages long, contains two science fiction classics, the novels The Invisible Man and When the Sleeper Wakes. The third part of the book is taken up by a work of Wellsian prophecy, The Shape of Things to Come, which is sometimes shrewd and farseeing, sometimes journalistic and topical in a dated way, sometimes merely fatuous. It is also handicapped by the fact that Wells's polemical prose is often fuzzy and shapeless, no doubt the product of his lifelong fault of writing too fast. The two science fiction stories, however, still have plenty of life and pace and invention, and Wells's early grounding in science was almost always an asset to him. Though uninspired and rather common place as a socio political thinker, he was genuinely a prophet of the Age of Technology.