William Leadford is a poor, clever, embittered young clerk in the smoke-blackened industrial Midlands, full of half-formed socialism and a burning sense of injustice. When Nettie, the girl he loves, runs off with the privileged young heir Edward Verrall, Leadford’s grievance curdles into murder: he buys a revolver and sets out to hunt the lovers down. Around his private fury the wider world is drifting toward catastrophe — strikes and unrest at home, a naval crisis and the slide to war abroad — while night after night a strange green comet grows larger in the sky.

At the very moment Leadford corners his rivals, the comet strikes the atmosphere and bursts. A soft green vapour rolls over the whole world, and everyone alive falls into a brief, healing sleep. They wake changed. The Change has swept anger, greed, jealousy, cruelty, and war out of the human heart — and the clear-eyed survivors set about dismantling the old order of poverty and ugliness and building a rational, generous new world in its place.

Written in 1906 by the master of the scientific romance, In the Days of the Comet turns a cosmic marvel into a utopian argument: that human misery is not fixed in our nature but is a remediable muddle that clearer heads could undo. Built as a stark before-and-after — a smoke-choked old world against a luminous new one — it remains one of Wells’s boldest and most hopeful books, frank even about love and property in ways that scandalised its first readers.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition, meaning, and method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.