H.G. Wells Anthologies books in order

Reading order

H.G. Wells’s short stories have appeared in anthologies for nearly a century. This list covers multi-author collections that include at least one Wells story, as distinct from single-author collections of his own work.

The range of these anthologies reflects the range of Wells’s writing. He shows up in science fiction collections like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame and Great Classic Science Fiction, in horror anthologies like Classic Tales of Horror and Tales of the Occult, and in mystery collections like The Best Crime Stories Ever Told. Some of these books, like 50 Great Short Stories, are general interest anthologies that include Wells alongside dozens of other authors from different periods.

Readers looking specifically for Wells’s stories may find overlap between these anthologies and his own single-author collections. The same popular stories, particularly “The Country of the Blind,” “The Star,” “The Red Room,” and “The Door in the Wall,” appear again and again across different editors’ selections. For a complete reading of Wells’s short fiction, the single-author collections are a better bet. These anthologies are more useful for readers who want to discover Wells in context alongside other writers.