I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author and narrator were a good fit and the story kept me in its thrall except for one time when my mind began to wonder and the following quote drew me quickly back into the fold:

"I stood staring into the pit and my heart lightened gloriously even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness the mighty engines so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows toward the light."

You would think that as Man grows in intelligence he would likewise grow in morality. But you would be wrong. Or at least, that is what history teaches us. About a hundred years before Harvard professor Robert Coles wrote his now famous article “The Disparity Between Intellect and Character,” H.G. Wells made much the same observation.

At the end of The War of the Worlds, the unnamed narrator returns to his house and sees the paper he had been working on before the war began. “It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilizing process” (194). There’s one for the wastepaper basket! As with much science fiction, the aliens in The War of the Worlds reveal more about us than about them.

Throughout the book, Wells compares Man with the lower animals. And it becomes increasingly uncomfortable. At the start, we are microbes under the Martians’ microscope. We might be able to pass over the metaphor without much thought if only he didn’t go on to compare us to monkeys, lemurs, dodo birds, bison, ants, frogs, rabbits, bees, wasps, and rats ~ animals we exploit or exterminate without compassion.

The narrator doesn’t fail to make the connection between the Martians’ treatment of humans and our treatment of animals. When he discovers that the Martians regard human beings as food, he is able to shift his perspective and see the human diet from the point of view of an animal that is typically regarded as food: “I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit” (139).

Moreover, it is not only animals that we destroy. Other humans are also fair game.

“And before we judge of them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” (5).

If only moral growth went hand-in-hand with intellectual growth! But apparently evolution doesn’t work that way. So a look at the Martians is a look into a mirror. It is also a look into our own future. And it is a future difficult to look upon. The Martians are ugly. And not just on the outside.

Evolution has turned them into little more than heads. Thanks to natural selection, their bodies function with marvelous efficiency. They need not eat, sleep, or engage in sexual intercourse. They communicate by telepathy. Through Darwinian adaptation, they lost what they did not need to survive and developed what they did need. And what they needed was intellect, not character. Heads, not hearts.

Is this where our species is headed? Wells was an advocate of Darwinism and if the Martians represent the future of Man, then The War of the Worlds must be read as a cautionary tale. The Epilogue supports this interpretation:

“If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils. Should we conquer?” (198-199).

Should we conquer? If we don’t want to become blood-sucking heads without hearts we had better not! On the contrary, we had better learn compassion for those over whom our superior intelligence gives us power. “Surely, if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity —pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (166).

Absolute classic. At the end of the 19th century earth (Britain to be precise) is invaded by the Martians. They come in kind of "cylinders" and devastate the surroundings of London. The population of London flees. There is absolute chaos. Can those invaders be stopped? A compelling novel on humanity feeling too safe on their planet. We can't let our guards down. As we can see now the invaders may not come from outer space but a virus may even be deadlier than extraterrestrials. Great descriptions, interesting philosophical ideas (the soldier) and a bit of romance at the end. A modern classic and must read!

Wars of invasion were very much upon the minds of people in Great Britain, and in other major nations of the world, during the late 19th century. Would Germany invade Belgium? Would the Austro-Hungarian Empire invade Serbia? But only the visionary mind of H.G. Wells was able to extrapolate from those fears of his time to imagine something even more seemingly unthinkable – an invasion of the Earth by hostile, technologically superior beings from another world – in a way that would capture the imaginations of countless thousands of readers, from Wells’s time to our own. Welcome to The War of the Worlds (1898).

In our time, Wells is best-known for his classic works of science fiction – works that, in his own time, would have been called “scientific romances”: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The First Men in the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906), and of course The War of the Worlds.

The basic principle in that time – as with many science-fiction works now – was to take what was known from the science of the time, extrapolate from that science, and use that imaginative leap as the basis for a suspenseful story. But because Wells was a thinker of such enormously wide interests, well-versed in history and philosophy as well as science, works like The War of the Worlds went far beyond the “scientific romances” of their time, and continue to thrill and fascinate the readers of today.

The narrator of The War of the Worlds is an unnamed writer of considerable accomplishment and wide-ranging interests – a man much like Wells, come to think – whose peaceful and contemplative life in a quiet corner of Surrey is forever changed when a cylinder, constructed by beings from another world, crashes in a nearby part of his home county, opening a crater where it fell. Wells’s narrator begins his story by recalling ruefully how ill-prepared the people of the Earth were for this event:

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s, and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. (p. 1)

It is, or course, conscious and deliberate that Wells links arrogant humankind with the microscopic organisms that were relatively new objects of discovery and interest for the scientists of that time – elsewhere in The War of the Worlds, the narrator refers to these creatures as “the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this Earth” (p. 103). The major nations of the world – then, as now – competed for power and influence; and meanwhile, “across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment” (p. 1)

The Martians emerge from the cylinder and quickly demonstrate their hostile intent, spreading death and destruction through the power of a Heat-Ray. A full 62 years before the construction of the first laser device, Wells posited the idea of a new kind of weapon – “A beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch; lead runs like water; it softens iron, cracks and melts glass; and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam” (p. 15). Generations of creators of “ray-gun” books and movies owe an incalculable debt to Wells.

It quickly becomes clear that the British armed forces – while well-prepared for a possible war against an earthly enemy like, say, the German Empire – are all but helpless before the Martians and their Heat-Ray. And the destruction that the Martians wreak with their Heat-Ray is increased exponentially, once the Martians in their craters have constructed their tripods – vast war machines with which the Martians can cover territory even more quickly than the tanks that would see action 20 years later in the Great War.

The narrator is utterly shocked by his first sighting of a Martian tripod:

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. (p. 27)

In narrative terms, The War of the Worlds goes back and forth between what the narrator witnessed in Surrey and what his brother saw happening in London. Both eyewitnesses would agree that “Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal” (p. 32). Indeed, while the Great War was still twenty years away, a modern reader of The War of the Worlds, contemplating Wells’s description of the Martians’ indiscriminate killing of soldiers and civilians, of peaceful cities being made the targets of military violence, might well find his or her thoughts moving from Wells’s Martians to the guns of August 1914.

Those parallels with the First World War take on additional force when one reads about how another weapon in the Martians’ arsenal is poison gas. The Martian tripods, it turns out, carry canisters that deploy a chemical weapon that the narrator refers to simply as “the black smoke”:

These canisters smashed on striking the ground – they did not explode – and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes. (p. 54)

Part of what impressed me, on this re-reading of The War of the Worlds, was a renewed sense of the predictive power of the book. It is not just that Wells’s novel looks ahead to topics like poison gas, or the laser, or mobile war machines that prefigure the development of tanks. A 21st-century reader might be just as impressed by Wells’s description of how the Martians bring with them a “Red Weed” – a strange form of red vegetation that grows in profusion wherever there is a water supply, and that chokes out all the Earthly vegetation around it. The term “invasive species” may not have been much in use in Wells’s time, but this aspect of The War of the Worlds certainly looks ahead to the global problem of invasive species today.

People are undone by the invasion; the truths and philosophies that they have depended on all their lives can no longer sustain them. A curate, who takes shelter with the narrator in an abandoned home after the Martians have destroyed the town of Weybridge, moans with self-pity; in response, the narrator angrily calls upon the curate to “Be a man!” and adds that “You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent, man” (p. 43)

The house in which the narrator and the curate have sought shelter is later struck and destroyed by a Martian cylinder, trapping them, for a time, in the ruins. Before long, the narrator gets the chance to see a Martian for himself:

They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies – or, rather, heads – about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils – indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell – but it had a pair of very large, dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body – I scarcely know how to speak of it – was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our denser air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whip-like tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. (p. 77)

As if the description of the Martians was not chilling enough, what we subsequently learn of their eating habits is even worse. The narrator recalls how the Martians “took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins” (p. 78). The narrator, who saw the Martians carrying out this process, insists that he can’t even bear to describe what he saw: “Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal…” (p. 78) It is details like these that make The War of the Worlds a truly disturbing novel – a classic of horror as well as science fiction.

On the chance that there is someone out there who doesn’t know how the novel ends, I will take care to avoid the need for a spoiler alert. I will say only that Wells adroitly scatters clues throughout the early parts of The War of the Worlds, preparing the reader for a resolution that affirms the narrator’s declaration at one point that “By the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright of the Earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain” (p. 103).

Throughout The War of the Worlds, Wells’s descriptions of the Martians’ literally bloodthirsty behaviour are meant to remind the reader of humankind’s distressingly regular demonstrations of a metaphorical thirst for blood. Near the book’s beginning, the narrator, looking back on the interplanetary war, writes that “before we judge of [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought”, and “not only upon animals, such as the bison and the dodo”. Citing the killing of almost all of the Indigenous people of Tasmania, “in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years” – Wells’s narrator asks implacably: “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” (p. 1)

And near the conclusion of The War of the Worlds, the narrator writes, more hopefully, that “Surely, if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity – pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (p. 92). If the world has not yet learned that lesson, or any sort of meaningful lesson about compassion – as the grim record of the twelve decades since the publication of Wells’s novel would seem to indicate – then the blame for that failure cannot be laid at Wells’s feet. Few writers, of any era, have been more prolific in their presentation of plans for social improvement and global peace.

The War of the Worlds is, purely and simply, one of the most influential novels ever written. Orson Welles’s panic-inducing 1938 radio-broadcast version of the novel is very fine, as are the film adaptations by George Pal (in 1953) and Steven Spielberg (in 2005); but there is no substitute for returning to this singularly powerful and disturbing short novel.

Was H.G. Wells schizophrenic? I'm just wondering because his novels fall into 2 distinct groups. There are the gently humorous novels such as "Kipps" or "The History of Mr Polly" - and then there are his SF novels, of which The War of the Worlds is surely the most famous.

His prescience is startling. Not only was he writing in the pre-atomic age, but it is as well to remember that this book was written over a century ago (1898) which is even before powered flight (though only just!) I now want to read "War in the Air" to see if his imagination mirrored a potential reality as accurately as this.

The story-line is gripping, and the descriptions of society's rapid decline into chaos immensely powerful. H.G. Wells is particularly good at seeing the individual's experience set against the whole devastating picture, (shifting between the viewpoint character and his brother), which draws the reader into the story.

I didn't listen to the novel-novel, but I listened to a radio adaptation performed by some fan-favorite cast members of Star Trek. <--Leonard Nimoy is amazing.
It was cool as hell.



And hilarious.
Because it doesn't really have a Big Battle or anything that humanity has to do to overcome these invaders. They just show up, and we watch in horror as they thoroughly hand us our asses.



Eventually, they just...die off because (regardless of their superior intelligence & firepower) they didn't get their shots before they landed on Earth.
So.
Basically, humans were saved because Mars was full of anti-vaxxers.



And if it happened on Mars, who's to say it can't happen here? Perhaps the true moral of the story is that by unlocking space travel, we can rid ourselves of some of our less desirable brethren by letting them roam around the universe unchecked?
I like to think that this story had a happy ending for more than just the Earthlings.



An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: John de Lancie, Meagan Fay, Jerry Hardin, Gates McFadden, Leonard Nimoy, Daryl Schultz, Armin Shimerman, Brent Spiner, Tom Virtue and Wil Wheaton.

I’m quite disappointed with this book, I am sure when it was written it was thrilling but the second half did nothing to warrant any fear from me and the first even less so. I had to laugh at the quote “the Martians understood doors!”, Simply because it’s hilarious to think they’ve invaded an entire planet only to struggle with a little latch. Another I really enjoyed but for other reasons goes as follows “the fear and empire of man had passed away”.

In fiction, the fate of the successful innovator is seldom a happy one; the writer who invents an original plot or fresh theme may seem predictable, even shallow, to later readers, once that plot or theme—appropriated by scores of imitators—no longer shines like new. So it is with H.G. Wells and his The War of the Worlds (1897). Invading creatures from outer space became a cliché of “golden age” science fiction, and a double-cliche after the drive-in movies of the ‘50’s. H.G.’s “bug-eyed monsters” no longer chill us as they did the thrilled readers of more than a hundred years ago.

That’s not H.G. Wells fault, though, for they are certainly bad-ass “bug-eyed monsters,” as “bug-eyed monsters” go. Bear-sized land-octopi with a circle of little mouth-tentacles (shades of Cthulhu!), they make their way around England in walking tanks (tripodal fighting machines equipped with a deadly heat-ray and an even deadlier cloud of black gas), sustaining themselves by draining the blood from any available human (or—in a pinch—a sheep or two) while emitting strange whistles of delight.

Still, scary stuff like this got old a long time ago, and I found myself bored with the whole monster invasion thing (as I suspect you might too). But then I paused, dipped a bit into literary history, and soon realized that The War of the Worlds was a more interesting work than I had suspected.

Ever since the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, dozens of English novels had been written under the umbrella of the “invasion literature” genre, beginning with Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), which featured a German invasion of England. The name of the invading country varied in these books—often Germany, sometimes France—but all the novels tended to feature surprise attacks, the devastation of Southern England (including London), and the inadequacy of English military preparedness. By the time Wells published his short novel in 1897, the genre of “invasion literature” had prepared an enthusiastic audience for his books.

Of course Wells enjoyed the invasion genre, and thought that the addition of Martians would “up the ante,” making The War of the Worlds the invasion novel to end all invasion novels. But I believe his intentions were more complex and richer than this.

I believe that what Wells admired most about the invasion genre was that it shattered the complacency of the English middle class, demonstrated that not only the horrors but—perhaps worse—the profound disruptions of war were possible even here, here at the heart of the Empire: the destruction of villages, the separation of families, the forced movement of whole populations. The problem with the invasion genre, though, was that its villains were too specific, too localized, too susceptible to British dislike of the Hun, mistrust of the Frog. Such parochial prejudices diminished the profound experience of disruption.

But what if the invading forces were not men at all, but beings from another planet, organisms that did not look or act like men? If so, then the writer could use the genre’s images of dislocation and disruption—the burning houses, the victims of a black gas, the horde of Londoners fleeing in terror—to say something about the vulnerability of the human race itself, a race all too convinced of their own imperial destiny.

I’ll end with this passage in which the principal narrator, who has just experienced the demolition of his hiding place and the death of his only companion (a selfish, vexatious, half-mad curate) looks out upon a landscape transformed by Martian war.

n  For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.n

Det var på tide at eg begynte å lese klassiske bøker som eg har tenkt heile livet at eg må lese. Denne var akkurat like interessant som eg håpte, og et kjærkomment avbrekk fra mine typiske sjangre.

There is considerable speculation that Wells (A) intended this short novel to be an asseveration on Darwinian natural selection. Wells himself was once a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, a man known affectionately (and scornfully) as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Whether or not that conjecture is true, it certainly fits the narrative.

It’s also speculated that this is (B) a slam on British colonialism, (C) an advocation for the rights of animals, and (D) a stab at religious fundamentalists. I doubt that Wells consciously set out to incorporate so many subliminal messages in this now classic sci-fi thriller.

A better explanation (in my humble opinion) is that Wells’ phenomenal ability to imagine real responses to surreal circumstances tends to bring our societal monsters (racism, exceptionalism, speciesism, etc.) out of the shadows.

Five Stars.

***2 stars***

As I suspected from the beginning that I would, I ended up not liking this book.

I stumbled across the paperback a couple of months ago and finally thought I'd give it a try. Honestly, I don't think there's anything wrong with this story specifically, I just don't enjoy classics at all and War of the Worlds was no exception. There's something about the writing that I disliked and this turned out to be one of the rare cases where I'd say stick to the movie, the book isn't worth it

The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. — H. G. Wells (1898), The War of the Worlds.

The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells, first serialized in 1897. The War of the Worlds was one of the first and greatest works of science fiction ever to be written. Even long before man had learned to fly, H.G. Wells wrote this story of the Martian attack on England.

The plot has been related to invasion literature of the time. The novel has been variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British imperialism, and generally Victorian superstitions, fears, and prejudices.

Wells said that the plot arose from a discussion with his brother Frank, about the catastrophic impact of the British, on indigenous Tasmanians. What would happen, he wondered, if Martians did to Britain what the British had done to the Tasmanians? The Tasmanians however lacked the lethal pathogens to defeat their invaders. ...

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «ج‍ن‍گ‌ ج‍ه‍ان‌ه‍ا»؛ «جنگ دنیاها»؛ نویسنده: جرج هربرت (اچ‌.ج‍ی) ول‍ز‏‫؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال 1999میلادی

عنوان: ج‍ن‍گ‌ ج‍ه‍ان‌ه‍ا؛ نویسنده: اچ‌. ج‍ی ول‍ز‏‫؛ مت‍رج‍م: ع‍ل‍ی‌ ف‍اطم‍ی‍ان‌؛ ت‍ه‍ران‌ وزارت فرهنگ و ارشاد اسلامی، سازمان چاپ وانتشارات، نشر چشم انداز، سال1377؛ در 254ص؛ مصور، شابک 9644220749؛ خلاصه شده از نسخه اصلی؛ چاپ دیگر 1379؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده ی 19م

عنوان: جنگ دنیاها؛ نویسنده: اچ.‌جی ولز؛ مترجم گروه ترجمه انتشارات آریانگار؛ تهران آریانگار، ‏‫1389؛ ‬در 64ص، رنگی؛ شابک9786009214389؛

عنوان: جنگ دنیاها؛ نویسنده: جرج هربرت ولز؛ مترجم: سیدرضا مرتضوی؛ تهران آفرینگان‏‫، 1394؛ در 64ص؛ شابک9786006753935؛

عنوان: جنگ دنیاها؛ نویسنده: اچ.جی. ولز؛ مترجم میرپویا حسینی‌اصل‌اسکویی؛ تهران انتشارات قافیه‏‫، ‏‫1397؛ در 64ص؛ شابک9786226605496؛

جنگ دنیاها عنوان رمانی علمی-تخیلی است، که «اچ.جی ولز» نویسنده ی «انگلیس»، در سال1898میلادی نگاشته و منتشر کرده اند؛ این رمان شرح تجربیات یک راوی گمنام است، که در حومه ی شهر «ل��دن»، شاهد هجوم موجودات بیگانه‌ ای از «مریخ» می‌شود؛ «جنگ دنیاها»، یکی از نخستین رمان‌هایی است، که ستیز بین نژاد بشر، و موجودات ماورایی را، با واژه هایش به تصویر می‌کشد؛ با الهام از این رمان، کتابهای مصور، مجموعه‌ های تلویزیونی، و فیلم‌های سینمایی بسیاری ساخته شده اند؛ «استیون اسپیلبرگ» نیز، در سال2005میلادی، با اقتباس از این کتاب، فیلمی با شرکت «تام کروز» را کارگردانی کردند؛

لندن، سالهای پایانی سده ی نوزدهم میلادی: مدتی است برجستگیها و انفجارهایی در سطح سیاره‌‌ ی «مریخ»، به چشم می‌خورد؛ چند دانشمند در رصدخانه های گوناگون، متوجه این پدیده ‌ی شگفت انگیز شده اند؛ آیا روی این سیاره، موجودات هوشمندی زندگی می‌کنند؟ کسی پاسخی برای این پرسش ندارد، تا اینکه شیئی به زمین اصابت می‌کند؛ نخست به نظر می‌رسد، این شیء شهاب سنگ باشد، اما شهاب سنگی در کار نیست....؛

جنگ دنیاها، نوشته‌ ی «هربرت جورج ولز»، یکی از نخستین آثاری است، که ستیز انسان و موجودات فضایی را بازگو میکند؛ این اثر خواندنی و هیجان انگیز از آن روز انتشار الهامبخش نویسندگان بسیاری بوده است؛ موجودات مریخی به سبب استفاده ی بسیار از هوش خود، تنها مغزی بزرگ و دهانی از آنان باقی مانده است، و با آشامیدن خون انسان نیرو میگیرند؛ در مقابل اما دستاوردهای فنون و آلات جنگی آنان چندین برابر بزرگ‌تر از ماشین جنگی «انگلستان» است؛ و مردم در برابر آن زبون و هراسان هستند، و جز تن دادن به مرگ راه چاره‌ ی دیگری ندارند؛

اندیشه ی نوشتن رمان جنگ جهان‌ها زمانی برای نویسنده پدید آمد، که استعمارگران اروپائی، با حمله به جزیره «تاسمانی» در نزدیکی «استرالیا»، مردم بیگناه و بومی آن جزیره را میکشتند؛ نویسنده با برادرش «فرانک»، درباره ی این جنگ گفتگو میکرد، که برادرش گفت: «فرض کن که موجودات سیاره‌ ای دیگر از آسمان فرود آیند و سراسر انگلستان را به تسخیر خود درآورند!»؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 27/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 11/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی