The Last Books of HG Wells
The Happy Turning
&
Mind at the End of  Its Tether

HG Wells
New Forewords by Rudy Rucker and Colin Wilson
ISBN 0-9766843-1-4
Available Nov. 2006
96 pages
$8.95

This volume contains the last two works by HG Wells. Near the end of his life, increasingly distressed over the war, Wells deals with death and apocalypse, mortality and religion and with "human insufficiency."

Mind at the End of Its Tether

"One approaches it with awe. You come across references to it everywhere: Colin Wilson, Priestly, Koestler. It seems to have been a wounding work; something no one could agree with, but something that couldn't be taken lightly." - Art Beck

"In the face of our universal inadequacy...man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favor of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether." - HG Wells

The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life

Wells' barbed fantasies about the afterlife take the form of "happy" dream walks. In one he converses with Jesus:

"But being crucified upon the irreparable things that one has done, realizing that one has failed, that you have let yourself down and your poor silly disciples down and mankind down, that the God in you has deserted you - that was the ultimate torment. Even on the cross I remember shouting something about it."

"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" I said.

"Did someone get that down?" he replied.

"Don't you read the gospels?"

"Good God, No!" he said. "How can I? I was crucified before all that."