I went into the bookstore the other day, and my friend was describing this book by H G Wells that she’d bought. It was called “The New World Order” and was dated 1940. I had no idea he’d written anything that late, but googling showed that he died in 1943.
H G Wells’ later works are not as well known as the famous science fiction dating from the 1890s, such as The War of the Worlds. They bacame increasingly political–he was an avowed socialist and wrote a history of the future world called The Shape of Things to Come in 1933 or so. I wondered whether The New World Order was a continuation of that, so I turned to my Stanza program to see what was downloadable for free.
There was no trace of The New World Order, but I found a story called The Truth About Pyecraft. In it, a very fat man wants to lose weight, and asks his friend to brew up a potion using the recipies of the friend’s Hindu great-grandmother. The postion works, but there’s a slight problem…
The name of the story rang a bell.
When I was a kid, we had a collection of 16 books of kids’ stories. They were bound in red, and each volume had a different type of story. One was classic stories, one was fairy tales, one was sports stories, and so on. The last volume was science fiction–but only half of it. The second half was a guide for parents.
I felt shortchanged–science fiction was my favourite, and there was only half a volume, while every other kind got a full volume! But I enjoyed the stories anyways.
Now, we had these books when I lived in Peterborough. We moved away when I turned 7, and I don’t remember seeing them later. I definitely lost track of them by the time my parents split up when I was 15. But in all the time since, I wondered what happened to them, and lately I’ve wanted to read the stories again, especially one that had time-traveling high-school kids from the 1950s going forward in to to the incredible year 2006.
I was sure that The Truth About Pyecraft was in this book. I started googling, turning up references to anthologies containing the story. But none was the right one. Then I found it.
The Children’s Hour. Sixteen volumes, red, last one SF… this was it!
After all these years, a mystery solved. Just like when I found that song about shoes. 