The Country of the Blind: A story inspired by the idiom "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". A hiker in the Andes gets trapped in an isolated valley of people who have been fully blind for 14 generations. Spoiler: he does not become king.

The Star: A formerly-unknown planet from the outskirts of our solar system crashes into Neptune. The two planets fuse and go hurtling toward the Sun. Their trajectory will not send them anywhere near Earth, except that Jupiter is in the way. Jupiter's gravitational field pulls the "star" just far enough off its path to send it toward Earth.

The New Accelerator: A man invents a "medicine" that allows the user to speed up, to the point where the world seems frozen around them. He and his colleague take some and see what happens. The interesting part of this story, to me, was that although they intended that the medicine be used for time-saving and scholarly purposes, they fully admitted that it could be used to commit crimes, but they decided they would sell it anyway and that would be someone else's problem. That certainly wouldn't happen today!

The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes: A scientist has an accident with an electromagnet, and can only see a tropical beach and the ocean, though he is actually in a laboratory in London.

Under the Knife: A man worries about a surgery he is going to have, sure he is going to die. During the surgery he has an out-of-body experience.

The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper: On Nov 10, 1931, Mr. Brownlow accidentally gets a newspaper from Nov 10, 1971. He tells his friend about what he sees (and doesn't see) in it. This story was particularly excellent, as half the fun of reading Wells is his prophecies about the future. ( )