The Star

The Star (1897) is an early short science fiction story by the British writer H. G. Wells and one of his works most frequently included in science fiction anthologies. The story begins with a seemingly ordinary astronomical observation: astronomers discover a new luminous body in the depths of the night sky. At first it is merely an anomaly in the observation records, but it keeps approaching the solar system. As its orbit is gradually calculated, people realize that this strange body is heading toward Earth at astonishing speed. Disaster arrives almost without warning—gravitational disturbances trigger worldwide earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and volcanic activity; coastlines are swallowed, cities destroyed, seasons and climate thrown into chaos, and humanity appears small and powerless before an event on a cosmic scale. The story's most famous aspect is its perspective: Wells does not focus on one hero's escape but keeps shifting the lens from observatories to sailors at sea, from ordinary citizens to observers far away on Mars, making the disaster an event "watched" by the entire solar system. The ending carries Wells's characteristic cold irony—the body once seen as a harbinger of doom, perhaps even on course to destroy Earth, ultimately only passes by, yet permanently changes the face of the planet and humanity's sense of its own place. Though brief, the work epitomizes Wells's approach of "deducing disaster from science and reflecting the human condition at cosmic scale," making it an accessible entry point to the early science fiction tradition of disaster imagination.