H. G. Wells

Twenty-one-year-old Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to live her own life. When her father forbids her from attending a fashionable ball, she leaves her family home and makes a fresh start in London. There she meets the brilliant Capes, a married academic, and quickly falls in love, but she soon finds that freedom comes at a price…

The gripping tale of man's first journey to the moon, undertaken by one Mr. Bedford, a bankrupt businessman, and the eccentric scientist Mr. Cavor. Here they discover a sophisticated civilization, dominated by an insectlike race they call the Selenites.

BBC radio productions of H. G. Wells' finest fiction - plus hear H G Wells in his own words in a selection of original radio broadcasts from the 1930s and 40s H. G. Wells is one of the founding fathers of science fiction, renowned for his futuristic tales in which he predicted space travel, lasers, the atomic bomb and wireless communication. But in addition to his 'scientific romances', he also wrote numerous ghost stories, domestic comedies and Utopian novels espousing his ideals of socialism and feminism. This collection features a selection of his best works from across these genres. Here are dramatisations of his sci-fi and fantasy classics, The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon, with stellar casts including Robert Glenister, Bernard Cribbins, Garard Green, Blake Ritson and Hywel Bennett, as well as a reading by Stephen Murray of The Invisible Man. Wells' comic novels of lower middle-class life are represented by Love and Mr Lewisham (read by Paul Daneman), and adaptations of Kipps, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly, starring Mark Straker, Neil Dudgeon and Christopher Guinee.

Also included is a dramatisation of his 'New Woman' novel Ann Veronica, with Amy Hoggartas the eponymous heroine and Bill Nighy as the Narrator. One of Wells' most famous supernatural short stories, The Inexperienced Ghost, is dramatised with a full cast including Donald Houston and Christopher Guard, and four further short tales - In the Abyss, The Sea Raiders, A Dream of Armageddon and The New Accelerator - are read by Timothy Keightley and Robert Bathurst. In the fascinating documentary H G Wells: The Invisible Author, Brian Morton asks whether the focus on Wells' science fiction has overshadowed his other authorial achievements. And we hear Wells in his own words as he discusses topics as diverse as world politics, the history of the printing press, the possibilities of technology and the shape of things to come... Lastly, Martyn Wade's original drama The Wells Way brings H. G. Wells and George Gissing together at crisis points in their lives, as each tries to be more like the other. Julian Rhind-Tutt stars as Wells, with Joseph Millson as Gissing.

A young scientist who discovers the secret of invisibility feels initial joy at his newfound freedoms and abilities. But it quickly turns to despair when he realizes the many things he has sacrificed in the pursuit of science. While he struggles to create the formula that will restore his visibility and his connection to other people, murder and mayhem ensue.

Edward Prendick, a naturalist, is shipwrecked on the island retreat of notorious vivisector, Dr Moreau. In a laboratory called the House of Pain, Moreau manufactures 'humanised' animals known as the Beast People, whom he controls through fear - until the terrifying day when one of his degraded victims turns against him.

A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. When he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover a hierarchal society in which more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom.

When a Victorian scientist invents a machine that allows him to travel to the year A.D. 802,701, he encounters a highly evolved society of people called Eloi, and the brutish Morlocks who lurk in tunnels beneath them. His discovery leads him to a horrifying insight into the fate of mankind.

H. G. Wells' classic vision of interplanetary warfare and a Martian invasion of Earth, and the resulting panic and destruction.