H. G. Wells is a Victorian-era James Bond who must defend England and the world against time travelers, alien incursions and interdimensional threats (if he can learn quickly on the job, and survive the human foes he encounters, that is!) During his missions, Wells will alternately team up with Anton Chekhov to foil an assassination plot against Prince Nicholas Romanov of Russia, oversee the construction of the giant antenna designed to detect alien invasion fleets (or, as we know it, the Eiffel Tower), rub shoulders with the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie Curie, Jules Verne and Annie Oakley, and risk everything to encourage cooperation amongst the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. This humorous steampunk novella is filled with Easter eggs and British pop-culture references, from The Beatles and Ian Fleming to Douglas Adams and Dr. Who.
Author
Alex Shvartsman is a writer, editor, and translator from Brooklyn, NY. He's the author of The Middling Affliction (2022) and Eridani's Crown (2019) fantasy novels. Kakistocracy, a sequel to The Middling Affliction, is forthcoming in 2023. Over 120 of his stories have been published in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, and many other venues. He won the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and was a two-time finalist (2015 and 2017) for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction. His collection, Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories and his steampunk humor novella H. G. Wells, Secret Agent were published in 2015. His second collection, The Golem of Deneb Seven and Other Stories followed in 2018. Alex is the editor of over a dozen anthologies, including the Unidentified Funny Objects annual anthology series of humorous SF/F.
