The Crystal Egg, by H G Wells

In a small grimy shop selling bric-a-brac and antiquities in Seven Dials, London, was a large crystal egg. The shop's proprietor, a Mr. C Cave, was reluctant to sell, even when offered the outrageous sum of five pounds! His step-family didn't understand, there was so much they could with a fortune like that!

What was it about that crystal egg that presented Mr. Cave from selling?

"The Crystal Egg" appeared in "Tales of Space and Time," Harper & Brothers, London and New York, 1900, pages 1 - 33.

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Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".

As a futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction."

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed "Wells's law." His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907), and the dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1910).

Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (Diabetes UK) in 1934.

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