Episode 18: 'The Cone' by H.G. Wells

 


 Thanks to War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man Herbert George (H.G.) Wells is regarded first and foremost as a pioneer of science-fiction writing. But there is a seam of horror that runs through his sci-fi, and his penchant for the macabre is felt even more strongly in his short fiction.

The Cone (1895) doesn't necessarily qualify as science-fiction, conceived (according to John R. Hammond in his Preface to H.G. Wells) as "the opening chapter of a sensational novel set in the Five Towns" which the author later abandoned. Instead, we find Wells detailing a culture clash, admittedly in a fairly lurid way.  In this brutal tale of revenge, the effete Raut (whom we deduce is an artist) laments the industrialisation of the British landscape and sneers at the heartless, souless industrialists who care for nothing but progress and profit.  He is also having an affair with the wife of Horrocks, owner of a Staffordshire ironworks, who walks in on their illicit tryst and immediately sees red...

What's perhaps surprising in The Cone is that Wells allows us to sympathise with the industrialist. As this grim tale proceeds to its terrible and inevitible conclusion, the ironmaster (via Wells) persuasively and poetically makes the case for the industrial landscape as a thing of beauty.

Not sci-fi then, but is it horror? The Cone earns its place on the podcast for its horrific climax - a set-piece of operatic violence described by Wells in startlingly graphic detail.

Your old flame

 

Jasper

 

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About the episode

"The Cone" by H.G. Wells was first published in 1895 in Unicorn. It was collected in The Plattner Story and Others, published by Methuen & Co. in 1897 and later reprinted in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Wells published by Thomas Nelson & Sons in 1911.

End theme music: 

The Black Waltz by Scott Buckley | www.scottbuckley.com.au Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Incidental music:

The Dread by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4491-the-dread
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Sound effect attributions: 

https://freesound.org/people/morgantj/sounds/60610/*

https://freesound.org/people/campl/sounds/138461/*

https://freesound.org/people/sforsman/sounds/381994/*

https://freesound.org/people/Hampusnoren/sounds/564936/*

https://freesound.org/people/FrosswireVis/sounds/448517/*

https://freesound.org/people/XHALE303/sounds/466397/*

*All used with the following licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All other sound effects sourced at Freesound.org

The recording was created using Audacity and BandLab. Podcast hosted by Anchor.

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