The Country of the Blind and Other Stories was published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in 1911 and is Wells’s most comprehensive short story collection — thirty-three stories spanning his career, including revised versions of earlier published tales alongside newer work. It is also one of the finest single-author collections of short fiction in the English language, containing at least half a dozen stories that belong in any anthology of the form.
The Collection
The title story, “The Country of the Blind,” is Wells’s most famous short work: a mountaineer, Nuñez, stumbles into an isolated valley in the Andes where the entire population has been blind for fifteen generations. He expects to rule them (“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”), but discovers that sight is meaningless in a society organized entirely around other senses. His vision is interpreted as a disability — a delusion that must be cured by removing his eyes. The story is a parable about the relativity of knowledge: expertise in one context is irrelevance in another.
Other major stories include:
“The Star” — an asteroid approaches Earth, causing catastrophic floods and earthquakes; Martian astronomers observe the event with detached interest, noting that the damage to the little planet was “surprisingly slight.” A masterpiece of cosmic perspective.
“The Door in the Wall” — a politician haunted by a childhood memory of a garden glimpsed through a green door, representing everything life has made him sacrifice for worldly success. Wells’s most purely poetic story.
“The Empire of the Ants” — intelligent ants are spreading through the Amazon basin, and humanity, distracted by its own affairs, fails to notice the threat until it may be too late. A story about civilizational complacency.
“The New Accelerator” — a drug that speeds up human perception so that the world appears frozen. A brilliant thought-experiment that anticipates the “bullet time” concept by nearly a century.
Themes
Perspective — many of Wells’s best stories work by shifting the reader’s perspective: seeing Earth from Mars, seeing human civilization from the viewpoint of insects, seeing sight itself from the perspective of the blind.
The limits of knowledge — Wells’s scientists frequently discover things they cannot control, cannot communicate, or cannot survive. Knowledge in Wells is power, but it is also danger.
Social satire — the comedic stories in the collection are as accomplished as the science fiction: sharp, funny observations of Edwardian social life.
Collecting The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
First edition (Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, 1911): Green cloth binding with gilt lettering. No dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine copies: $800–$2,000
- Very good: $300–$800
- Good: $100–$300
First American edition (various publishers compiled individual stories): No direct American equivalent to this specific collection.
The collection has been continuously in print for over a century, making first editions the primary collecting target. Individual stories have appeared in thousands of anthologies.