Take a photo of a barcode or cover
cremullins 's review for:
The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
This book surprised me with how good it was. I've long been a fan of Jeff Wayne's musical adaptation of the novel but have never actually read the book. I started reading the book this morning and finished it on the same day, so gripping it was.
As Victorian fiction goes, The War of the Worlds is remarkably progressive, owing to Wells's socialist views. Its very first chapter compares the Martian invasion to the cruelty that European colonialism inflicted on the Global South, an impressive comparison for a Victorian man of letters to make.
The descriptions of devastation and destruction in the book's early chapters seem to eerily predict the horrors of the Blitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima. At the time Wells wrote this novel, flight was still considered to be physically impossible (to the point that). There did not exist a bomb large enough to wreak the kind of havoc the Martians wreak. Less than fifty years after its writing, humanity would develop bombs capable of levelling entire cities.
The book also contains an early depiction of chemical warfare, which is all the harsher with the knowledge that, around a decade and a half after its publication, many boys hiding in trenches all over Europe would be choked to death with poison gas released not by Martians but by their fellow men.
The novel is an early attempt at "hard" science fiction based on the conjectures of the day; Wells clearly did his research and consulted scientific journals of the time for his ideas pertaining to evolution and technology. Of course, a lot of the science is dated now, and we of course have been to Mars in the intervening time and know that it's mostly a barren wasteland rather than the dying world Wells envisions; nevertheless, this remains a work of incredible imagination and scope despite its brevity.
I can see now why this novel is hailed as one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time - it can be considered one of the earliest cohesive attempts to use scientific conjectures to inform a work of fiction, and its influence on Golden Age science fiction is notable.
I shall be returning to this novel again in future. My only regret is that I hadn't read it sooner.
As Victorian fiction goes, The War of the Worlds is remarkably progressive, owing to Wells's socialist views. Its very first chapter compares the Martian invasion to the cruelty that European colonialism inflicted on the Global South, an impressive comparison for a Victorian man of letters to make.
The descriptions of devastation and destruction in the book's early chapters seem to eerily predict the horrors of the Blitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima. At the time Wells wrote this novel, flight was still considered to be physically impossible (to the point that
Spoiler
in the closing epilogue, his narrator states that the Martians gave humanity the "Secret to Flight"The book also contains an early depiction of chemical warfare, which is all the harsher with the knowledge that, around a decade and a half after its publication, many boys hiding in trenches all over Europe would be choked to death with poison gas released not by Martians but by their fellow men.
The novel is an early attempt at "hard" science fiction based on the conjectures of the day; Wells clearly did his research and consulted scientific journals of the time for his ideas pertaining to evolution and technology. Of course, a lot of the science is dated now, and we of course have been to Mars in the intervening time and know that it's mostly a barren wasteland rather than the dying world Wells envisions; nevertheless, this remains a work of incredible imagination and scope despite its brevity.
I can see now why this novel is hailed as one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time - it can be considered one of the earliest cohesive attempts to use scientific conjectures to inform a work of fiction, and its influence on Golden Age science fiction is notable.
I shall be returning to this novel again in future. My only regret is that I hadn't read it sooner.