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In the title story, a mountaineer named Nunez falls into a hidden valley in the Andes, cut off from the world for generations, whose people have all been…
In the title story, a mountaineer named Nunez falls into a hidden valley in the Andes, cut off from the world for generations, whose people have all been born blind and have forgotten that sight exists. Remembering the saying 'In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king', he expects to rule them, but finds that they think him mad, and that to marry the girl he loves he must give up his eyes. The collection includes more than thirty other stories by H. G. Wells.
Context and significance
Wells published 'The Country of the Blind' in 1904 and gathered what he thought the best of his short stories in this volume in 1911, among them 'The Door in the Wall' and 'The Star'. Read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.