The Diamond Maker is a short story by the English writer H. G. Wells (1866–1946), first published on August 16, 1894, in the London magazine The Pall Mall Budget. It was later collected in Wells's first short-story collection, The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895), and reprinted in The Door in the Wall and Other Stories (1911). The story is narrated in the first person by a businessman with offices near the London commercial courts: one evening, walking on the Thames Embankment, he is approached by a ragged, vagrant-looking man who speaks, however, in refined tones, like a respectable businessman. The man takes from his bag a brown crystal nearly the size of a thumb and, by easily scratching a white line on the narrator's watch glass while a knife cannot mark it, hints that it is a diamond. He claims to have spent fifteen years secretly developing synthetic diamonds alone, exhausting his fortune, renting a cheap lodging in Kentish Town, and supporting himself with odd jobs, until, inspired by the experiments of the French scholar Dobre, he succeeded by sealing the raw material for diamonds together with explosives in a sturdy cylinder and detonating it to create pressure. But his neighbors took him for a bomb-making anarchist and called the police, so he fled with his diamonds and has been on the streets ever since: he holds stones worth hundreds of thousands of pounds yet cannot sell them because he cannot explain their origin. He offers to sell one to the narrator for a hundred pounds; the narrator hesitates, leaves only his card, and never sees him again. The story closes with the narrator's recollection: is the man dead, or will he one day become famous? Has he himself missed a business opportunity? The work draws on the scientific background of the time, when Hannay, Moissan, and others claimed to have made synthetic diamonds, and is a typical Wellsian short story on the theme that science may bring either benefit or destruction.
威尔斯最广为人知的是《时间机器》《隐身人》《星际战争》，但他短篇中的奇想与冷峻同样值得一读。《钻石制造者》篇幅极短，却把一个“科技与命运错位”的母题写得极为干净：一个人真的造出了钻石，却因此成为无法证明自己的流浪者。小说几乎是科学史的现场记录——1879年汉内的声明、1893年莫瓦桑的高温高压实验，都在故事里留下了回声，读者能借此看到十九世纪末科学乐观主义与怀疑论的张力。威尔斯的叙述技巧也颇讲究：一个穿旧外套的陌生人，一颗划伤怀表的石头，一句一百英镑的报价，悬念、证据与犹豫层层递进，最后把判断权留给读者。它适合作为认识威尔斯短篇风格的入口，也适合课堂讨论“知识、财富与伦理”。
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was a British novelist, journalist, sociologist and historian, and is regarded as the father of science fiction. Public information on the details of his early life and writing career is limited, yet the character of his work is clear: science fiction such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds uses scientific speculation to explore social and human questions, with bold imagination and calm narration, while history books such as A Short History of the World and The Outline of History set out the course of human civilization in an accessible style. His works foresaw the aeroplane, the tank and nuclear weapons, and have deeply influenced later science fiction. This site holds 29 of his works, spanning foreign literature, science fiction, world history and history reading.
