All too often they are tales of failed revelation. In Wells’s world the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not eaten – not because of fear or difficulty, but because of embarrassment – and over and again knowledge or something equally as magical (the secret of making diamonds, an egg that shows us life on Mars, the formula for invisibility) is lost to the world. At the end of many of these stories the world is unchanged, and yet it could have been changed utterly and irrevocably.
