A short story on dream of becoming invisible
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HG Wells claimed in his autobiography that he and Joseph Conrad had "never really 'got on'", but you wouldn't suspect that from the gushing fan letter Conrad sent to Wells, eight years his junior but far more established as a writer, in 1897. Before their friendship soured, Conrad idolised him, and he wrote to rhapsodise the author of scientific romances as a "Realist of the Fantastic". It's a perceptive formula, capturing Wells's blend of wild invention and social realism: tea and cakes and time machines. That attitude is nowhere more evident than in the book that elicited Conrad's letter: The Invisible Man.
To judge from Wells's own account of his objectives, Conrad had divined them perfectly. "For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly," Wells wrote in 1934, "he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis … instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible."
To judge from Wells's own account of his objectives, Conrad had divined them perfectly. "For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly," Wells wrote in 1934, "he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis … instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible."
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