I ran through a big book of H.G. Wells' short stories when I was in high school or shortly thereafter. I found them to be wonderful excursions of the imagination before there were sharply defined terms such as science fiction and fantasy (which have only become more balkanized and minutely defined since). He was truly a seminal thinker of the early twentieth century, with an effect on those who came after him not only in fiction, but also in science and social thought. As effective if not more so than Robert A. Heinlein or Philip K. Dick.