Na, das ging zum Ende hin jetzt hopp la hopp.
In der zweiten Hälfte hätte sich Herr Wells noch etwas mehr austoben dürfen. 100 Seiten mehr bitte!
Übrigens ist Zeitreisen aus beschriebenen Gründen ebenso nicht empfehlenswert. Was man sich da alles einfangen kann….

Read as part of the Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003.

The War of the Worlds goes beyond the of-the-time popular military invasion fiction, which took away the standard protagonist/antagonist arc of single characters and popped whole countries or tribes in their place, and brings down to Earth a whole new enemy at a time when science fiction did not exist and science itself was oft thought of as fiction.

In Surrey, a professor is caught up in the invasion of Martians as they sweep through London and its surrounding boroughs after witnessing several explosion on the planet Mars at the Ottershaw observatory. We follow the un-named professor and his brother in first-person narrative, seeing through their eyes this invasion and the destruction caused.

n  The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of noises-the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames.n

The first thing one needs to reference is the radio adaptation of 1938, which was narrated by Orson Welles and caused panic due to its news-bulletin style: those listening thought it was the truth. Whilst reading the novel, there is no doubt that the imagery, style and prose of H.G. Wells purported this panic. It is written with such imagination that it's difficult not to imagine oneself standing on the side of a crater as Martians crawl sluggishly out of their spaceships.

It is not often that I can forgive a book its downfalls due to the time of its writing. (It's all very well to accept that, for the most part, racism and sexism and things of that ilk were at many times in history acceptable behaviour, but enjoying a book from a period with those things in this day and age is a thing I find difficult to do.) However, in the case of The War of the Worlds I think it is vitally important to read the book with the exact time and place it was written in history to be lodged within your mind alongside every word you read.

We have a primitive form of speculative fiction, the very foundations of what we now call science fiction. At the time, H.G. Wells was writing fiction that had scientific and imaginative leanings, but no-one would dare think that perhaps the fiction was not quite fiction after all. There is little mention of the Martians weaponry or technology except when it is in use: any modern-day writer of sci-fi would absolutely be telling you all about the nuts and bolts of the piece. We have primitive science, because that is what they had at the time of writing. Whilst the future may have been thought of, the idea of futuristic technology was as alien to them as the Martians and their technology are in the book.

So, the excitement of the scientific exploration of futures is not to be found here. But the imagination of Wells is so beyond almost everything else that was around at the time and coupling it with popular militarist fiction means that this is an extremely important novel in the progression of English fiction. It is not surprising that Wells was, like Darwin himself, stuck inextricably between the truth of science and the tradition of religion.

The story itself, if put in perspective-removed from its time period and thought of solely as a novel-is nothing special. The narrator is disjointed with his surroundings, the story disappointing in the way it ends and less dramatic and climactic than it could have been. The style of prose is lacking, the dialogue just standard and the characters just slight breezes on a warm day. In that, it would require a mere two or three stars: enjoyable, if a little boring. But this is a novel that should be remembered for when it was written.

The imagination of a scientific man who is at odds with what is right and wrong. The spectacular birth of a new genre of, not only writing, but of thinking, too. The fact that even though my oestrogen levels were almost at zero, the reunion at the end made me cry my eyes out because it was written so perfectly, so unexpectedly.

Of course, that film with that actor was better. Of course it was. We have perspective and technology now that means the original The War of the Worlds is pretty pathetic. It cannot possibly compete with our high standards of today, unless you have half a brain and take this novel for what it truly represents. Unless.

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 our own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise 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. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

Hmmmmm, how fucking amazing is this? Actually, the whole first chapter of this book, titled, "THE EVE OF WAR" is pretty amazing. Very enjoyable. The book loses something when it adopts our MC telling us about his experiences during the invasion, but Wells rescues himself with some breathtaking breakdowns of morality, ethics, war horrors, and survival. Not to mention class differences.

Wells is also, like Faber in Under the Skin, using aliens and science fiction to push a vegan agenda.

"You can't be serious, Carmen. H.G. Wells was not pushing a vegan agenda."

CARMEN: *sips coffee*
*looks at you*

Oh, yes, he absolutely was, and vegans of today who are interested in reading works of fiction which promote vegan lifestyles can enjoy both this book and Faber's book and perhaps incorporate them into a vegan book club. I mean, surely vegans must get tired of what can sometimes be self-righteous and pompous propaganda which exists in vegan non-fiction. Not to mention it is often fucking depressing, especially the books that talk about the suffering of animals in graphic detail. Even if something like veganism was not popular in Wells time and place, you can easily see how this is a vegan book.

The book makes some (what must be at the time: earthshattering) conclusions about humankind. This is a book like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which, when you read it now, it seems like old hat, but in its day must have just blown people away with its radical concepts.

Imagine humans NOT being the masters of all they survey. Imagine humans encountering beings smarter, stronger, and more ruthless then themselves, which see humans simply as ants, cockroaches, or rabbits - to be exterminated and/or eaten. That's what we are dealing with here, and it cannot be denied that Wells revolutionized and charged the genre of science-fiction much the way Mary Shelley did with her revolutionary, mind-blowing Frankenstein.

A lot of people read FRANKENSTEIN today and are disappointed. It's so old-fashioned. It's nothing like the media trained you to think it was. It's slow, it's old. You might read WAR OF THE WORLDS or DRACULA or DR. JEKYLL and feel the same way. But you have to understand that at the time, these authors were completely slaying people's long-held beliefs and way of thinking. Some of the old sci-fi/horror classics hold up, and some don't. DR. JEKYLL is particularly weak IMO, but DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN hold up very well (IMO). I loved both and think they are still very arresting and relevant today.

So how does WAR OF THE WORLDS hold up? Amazing first chapter that blows you out of the water.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge 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 inferior races.

Think of everything humanity does to animals, and the genocide, war, and slavery it inflicts on other human beings. Wells keeps bringing this up throughout the novel in a rare show of clear-eyed thinking about humanity, especially for an Englishman in 1898.

Now, the book loses something when we start following our MC around and experiencing the invasion with him. But the book saves itself in a few ways.

One, Wells's writing.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
...
Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance.

He's got a lot of good writing in this book and some great turns of phrase.

Secondly, he decides not only to take down humanity's vanity and confidence, but also seeks to offer commentary on religion, class differences, and morality and ethics especially in the context of war. It's staggering how much he chooses to bite off here, but such takedowns engage the reader throughout the book.

He also doesn't skimp on the horror - not only the horrors and ravages of war, but the horror of the aliens and what they do to humans. It's honestly terrifying and Wells successfully scared me and made me disgusted.

I think he made his MC deliberately a member of the intelligentsia instead of a soldier, because - let me tell you - this book would have been completely different if told from the POV of someone who was a combat veteran. And that's on purpose. As the soldier he meets points out to him, after you've seen some shit then shit isn't as shocking.

"I saw what was up. Most of the people were hard at it, squealing and exciting themselves. But I'm not so fond of squealing. I've been in sight of death once or twice; I'm not an ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst, death - it's just death. And it's the man that keeps on thinking comes through."

The way Wells wraps up the book, the way he brings everything to a close, is also fucking brilliant. It may seem cliched or old hat NOW, but you have to realize it was mindblowing back then. Much like the concept of Jekyll/Hyde.

Now. I'm not saying that just because a book has cultural relevance and significance and is a classic in its genre that it's automatically good. Because I don't believe in that shit. Instead, I found myself actually enjoying and liking this book. That doesn't happen to me with every classic. Not every classic holds up. But classics that I enjoy and hold up for me (P&P, S&S, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jane Eyre) don't please EVERYONE. I understand that old-fashioned books, language, and plotting can be boring and stupid to modern readers. And there are classics that come off that way to me, as well. So YMMV. I've certainly read classics that I've absolutely hated, and this might be one of those for you as well.

While reading this book it seemed achingly familiar to me. I think I've probably read this before. Maybe a decade ago or so, I don't know. It's also possible that this book is SO entrenched in pop culture that I just thought I'd read it, but I don't think so. But I'm going to list it here as my first reading since I can't specifically remember reading it before.

I like Wells's points here.
- His pushing of a vegan agenda; extraordinary for a man of his time.
- His takedown of religion and interpretation of God and what God entails. Not atheist, but a super interesting viewpoint of his time, cackling that 'God is not an insurance agent' and surmising that it's equally likely that humanity's new Martian masters also pray to God and expect God's protection.
- His portrayal as a curate (clergy) as a weak, spineless, helpless and selfish individual.
- His takedown and analysis of class differences, especially when the MC gets into a discussion with a soldier about humanity's future.
- His discussion of the horrors of war - not only what the enemy is inflicting upon you, but what war's victims end up doing to each other. His analysis of the terrible things people find themselves doing to survive, and if that can be forgiven or not when normality is restored.

Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.

I mean, take your pick, he just slays here with his cultural and social commentary. I find him lacking and tone-deaf on the plight of women, but I can't have everything. At least not from this author. >.< LOL


TL;DR - Hmmmmmmmm. Reading the sci-fi and horror classics can be very illuminating and oftentimes rewarding. That was the case here. Even though I don't think this book is a strong structurally as FRANKENSTEIN or DRACULA (the plot meanders a bit), Wells certainly hammers home not only his revolutionary and life-changing ideas, but puts forth some true literary gems.

Although it isn't perfect, I am still giving it five stars. With some caveats.

Also, I want to restate that this won't be for everyone.

Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place - a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity - pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

Read with Non-Crunchy Cool Classic Pantaloonless Buddy Read group, February 2018

Well I am thrilled to have read one of the 'granddaddies' of alien invasion books.

It was amazing to read the book that inspired other science fiction writers and movie makers and I was literally naming books and movies that I could see may have been inspired by this great novel. I did a little bit of reading about the novel and the time period it was written in, and it was fascinating to see that the invasion storyline was possibly due to feelings of unease in a time of British imperialism, and may have reflected fears that someone could do to Britain what they were doing to other nations. So many themes and ideas to contemplate in this novel. Interesting stuff!

This was a lovely book. I was expecting something much simpler (as I wasn't very impressed by The Time Machine), but this turned out to be very strong and interesting. First of all, who could say no to a world of aliens with scary death machines and yet also a world where they use bicycles to escape from them? (and I imagine those would be the large-wheeled curious ones, and not our typical bikes). Then, also a world in which monsters come from another planet, and yet, there is pretty much no real working airplane, quite yet. It's a marvel. For me, what was most puzzling was to try to understand just how innovative the author was to be able to imagine alien technologies almost of the same level as in today's movies, yet without all the accompanying technology we have to compare it with and get our inspiration from, when the author at that time hadn't seen any of it - quite simply because it didn't even exist yet. Can you believe that the man made up machines that have scarcely changed in fiction since his time..? That everyone a century later still writes almost about the same things, and nobody managed to quite go out of their league as much as he did? That is utterly amazing. And perhaps it's because this book was written almost in the 20th century (short of a few years, really), maybe that's why it feels so strangely contemporary.. But I still say that H.G. Wells was very far ahead of his time.

I found this story to be riveting. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I found the reaction from mankind to aliens invading in the late 1800s to be very well thought out by Wells. This idea had never been formed into a novel before, and I think all of the right notes were hit.

I really liked the main character, and I found him rather easy to route for. He went unnamed throughout the story, and I liked to picture that he was HG Wells, being that he was an author living outside of London. I loved his thought process and his survival instincts were wonderfully constructed. The internal struggles of these characters, and how that reflected to the outside world was masterfully done.

However, I kind of hated the middle. The narration takes a shift, and I understand why Wells did it, but I found it wholly unnecessary. There could have been better ways to go about it, if for example we followed his wife instead. That would have been far more interesting.

*May contain spoilers*

“Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further.”

The War of the Worlds is many things. It’s an action-packed, fast-paced science fiction tale of aliens and spaceships. Martians land in Woking, just south of London, and wreak havoc and destruction while a narrator observes and reports on how he survived.

It’s a reflection on possible human responses to the end of our known world. I found this aspect of the story fascinating. At first, people wanted to help the “visitors,” but gradually altruism gave way to self-preservation and fear. Those who survived the war had to decide what they were going to do now, and their approaches varied. Some folks struggled to discover the fate of their loved-ones. One military man devised an elaborate scheme to re-start the human race. Our narrator surprised himself at one point, at his willingness to merely be focused on the rules of a new card game he played with a fellow-survivor.

The work is also an allegory. In this story the aliens are Martians, but some (including Isaac Asimov who wrote an Afterword to my edition) think Wells was making a larger point. After all, history shows plenty of conquest and subjugation practiced by humans on other humans.

“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.”

Note: I enjoyed reading along with this version on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySM1R...

you've heard of The Book Was Better, now get ready for The Old-Timey Radio Adaptation Was Better

this was very impressive for its time, but...

hard to live up to a radio show so immersive and captivatingly realistic it tricked a bunch of dweebs from the past into thinking we were being invaded by aliens.

2.5 stars

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tbr review

one of the better first dates of my life involved going to look at a special moon event while listening to the radio adaptation of this book.

the person it was with turned out to be the worst so i'm going to read this and override the memory

الإنسان لا يحيا و لا يموت هباء
و لكن اتى النهار الذي ستعرف فيه المدينة اي هول كانت ترقد فوقه لالاف السنين
لقد انطلق الرعب في الشوارع في صورة مركبات ثلاثية الارجل ..يوقظها برق فتخرج من باطن الارض
لتحرق و تدهس و تنشر الفناء و تسرق الامان.. و يلاحظ ان ويلز حرص على ان يكون الشر كامنا في باطن ارضنا..بيننا و ليس قادما من كواكب اخرى

و مع انتشار الدمار تنتشر اخلاق الزحام
و ينقسم البشر الى : أكثرية تتصرف بانانية مطلقة و حماقة متناهية
و أقلية : يساعدون و يساعدون لو على حساب انفسهم
و مع توالى الاحداث الكابوسية يصبح البقاء للاذكى و الاوفر حظا

و يقرع ويلز اجراس الخطر