Nel coglier il senso di terrore che giunge a sopraffare i protagonisti di questo romanzo, talora dimentichiamo di vedere, oltre l'ombra dellinvasione marziana a scapito di popolazioni inermi, le tante conquiste coloniali, gli atti disumani, la distruzione di intere civiltà e culture portate avanti per pura sete di potere e denaro. Ma è Wells stesso che, in più di un'occasione, attraverso sapie ti rimandi, provvede ad aprirci gli occhi e a far trasparire le nostre stesse colpe negli stessi atti che, leggendo, ci vediamo condannare.

This novel must have been an incredibly unique concept when it was first published in 1898, with Martian vessels shooting out of the sky like falling stars, then rampaging across England in their death machines with advanced, unfathomable technology. It is easy to see how this story gave birth to a new genre and a plethora of novels after it.

I quite enjoyed the mix of an alien invasion with a late Victorian setting, especially the idea of people trying to escape them with horse and cart or in steam trains. While the style of writing lost me at many times, especially during the chapters where the narrator talks through the experiences of his brother without naming the man, the plot itself was captivating enough to pull me back in.

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.

More and more I have become interested in reading the predecessor classic novels like The War of the Worlds. Shamefully, this was actually my first H.G. Wells books, and although I have seen the movies, there is nothing like reading the book itself. After researching, I realized that Wells book is not the first science fiction novel, but I’ve noticed hints of its influence within the pages of other novels I’d read (from Kim Stanley Robinson to Stephen King).

It is also relevant to horror and fear, and I don’t think it’s lost much of its edge in that category. Evidently, Orsen Welles scared the crap out of a lot of people in 1938 during his radio broadcast using a modified version of The War of the Worlds. Since then, we have learned a lot more about Mars. Back in the late 19th century, the pictures and knowledge of the planet were fuzzy. I like that Wells used his big imagination to strike the imagination of readers. His vision of the Martians and their attack on our world is outstanding. Within the story there is also a personal story. The book speaks to human loss, but also to hope and triumph.

Because I love time travel novels, I surprised even myself by choosing this as my first Wells novel, over The Time Machine. I listened to The War of the Worlds by audiobook. I tend to miss more by audio. For those of you like me, I think reading is the best choice.

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.

Modern in story and easy to read but with in my view rather cardboard like characters and an ending which is too sudden.

Very interesting how concepts of intelligence without body, for me provoking thoughts about AI for instance, and the relationship of humanity versus a more advanced species, classical trophes in current SF, come back in this book from the late 1800’s.
A rightful classic!

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.

The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The War of the Worlds, the classic of alien invasion and interplanetary paranoia by H.G. Wells. Published in serial format by Pearson's Magazine from April 1897 to December of that year, the story originated after the author's relocation to the town of Woking in Surrey County. It was here that Wells also wrote his comic novel The Wheels of Chance, as well as The Invisible Man, which has now been replaced as my favorite Wells invention with this one.

The novel begins on a warm summer's night in June and unfolds from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, an academic in the field of philosophy who lives with his wife in Woking, southwest of London County and bordered on the north by the River Thames. A celestial alignment of Mars, Earth and the sun has generated much interest by members of the Astronomical Exchange, among them Ogilvy, a well-known astronomer and friend of the narrator's.

Ogilvy believes the possibility of life on Mars to be absurd. The narrator isn't so sure about that. Early in the morning, a "falling star" is reported in the skies over Berkshire, Surrey and Middlesex. Ogilvy tracks the descent of what is assumed to be a meteorite to a "common", or public land, near the town of Horsell. Climbing into the sand pit where the object has been buried, Ogilvy discovers a huge cylinder, which he determines to be hollow. He runs to get help and news quickly spreads of "the dead men from Mars".

While Ogilvy and a few other men from the Astronomical Exchange begin to excavate the cylinder, the narrator clings to rational thought, doubting there might actually be any intelligent life inside. He's dispatched to secure fencing needed to hold back the crowds that have begun to converge on the site. The narrator returns at dusk in time to witness the cylinder open. Expecting to see a man, onlookers are aghast at their first glimpse of a Martian in the flesh:

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon group of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.

A deputation including Ogilvy approaches the pit with a white flag in an attempt to communicate with the Martians. The party is met with what the narrator refers to as a "heat-ray", a flash of light which leaves the men charred and distorted beyond recognition. The narrator manages to flee the massacre and returns home to his wife. He's confident that the episode may all be a big misunderstanding and trusts that a company of soldiers heading to the site will sort everything out. Meanwhile, a second shooting star lights up the sky.

By afternoon of the next day, guns are heard firing and the narrator observes damage to the spires and chimneys about town. Concluding their home is now in range of the Martian heat-rays, the narrator procures a horse and dog cart from the local pub owner, quickly fills it with valuables and spirits his wife to the town of Leatherhead, where her cousins live. He insists on returning the horse and cart as promised, but upon his return to Woking that night, encounters a pair of giant Martian tripods stepping through the pine trees.

Higher than many houses and dangling steel tentacles, the tripods use their heat-ray to destroy the horse and cart. Through the hail and lightning of the dark, the narrator makes out the shapes of tripods on the march through the English countryside. Seeking shelter at home, he briefly takes in a soldier who initially can only mutter "They wiped us out--simply wiped us out." In the morning, the narrator sets out in search of his wife in the middle of, not a war, but the extermination of mankind.

The War of the Worlds is one of those classic tales that through more than a century of radio, television and film I was sure that I knew. Initially, Wells' typically British stoicism and reserve -- the narrator witnesses his mates microwaved by a Martian death ray and returns home, composes himself and tells the little lady it'll be quite all right in the morning -- kept me removed from the story. It was headed toward two stars and a box checked next to "War of the Worlds, Wells, H.G."

I caught up to the novel at the end of Book One, when the Narrator fishes himself out of the Thames and takes on a companion, a parish priest convinced divine retribution is at hand. The men become unwilling partners, plundering houses for food until a Martian cylinder crashes nearby and traps them. The story became much more thrilling through here, with the danger up close and personal. Instead of running, the narrator is able to study the Martians for the first time, uncovering unpleasant facts of the invader's diet.

Wells' "man on the street" reporting -- adapted by Orson Welles for his infamous 1938 Halloween radio broadcast -- has a unique way of putting the reader right in the middle of an invasion with a remarkable amount of verisimilitude. The heroics exhibited by his narrator are thankfully limited to his ability to stay alive and observe the enemy up close, as well as use his knowledge of the humanities to give what he's experiencing context.

-- Wells cites the names of so many towns and villages that a tourist could probably find their way around London by reading this book.

-- Next to New York, London has been destroyed by more science fiction writers than any other city. Panic takes the heaviest toll in The War of the Worlds. The scenes where the narrator wanders the empty city, certain he's the last survivor, were chilling.

-- The biology and technology of the Martians are ingeniously drawn and truly menacing. I haven't seen an alien in film or television in quite some time that were as designed as well as the Martians.

-- Wells does take an unnecessary detour, shifting focus to the narrator's brother as he flees the siege of London by poisonous black smoke, but even here, Wells' impeccable writing style kept me hooked:

In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii. We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift.

I found the depictions of how rustic the England of Wells' day truly was to be captivating. Most of the country is connected by rail, but once you left the train stations, you were in the 19th century, with horse cart, carriage or bicycle the best options for travel. Without telephone, television, radio or aircraft to provide news, the reader's imagination is allowed to run amok between pages and fill in the details of the invasion.

***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

A triumph of 19th century imagination!

Man had not yet learned to fly when HG Wells conceived this story of a Martian attack on England. Giant cylinders crash to earth, disgorging huge, unearthly creatures armed with heat rays and fighting machines. Amid the boundless destruction they cause, it looks as if the end of the world has come.

This novel represents an extraordinary blend of prophetic hard science fiction together with a superb narrative of the human effects of fear, war, mob psychology, courage, arrogance, pride, despair, faith and stupidity among other human strengths and weaknesses.

The ending represents a new beginning for a humanity that has received a wake-up call and an opportunity to start over with what Huxley would call a "brave new world".

Paul Weiss

“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, perhaps 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…”
-tH.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Many Halloweens have come and gone since I first purchased H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, intending it to be part of my seasonal reading. There it sat, with many other good literary intentions. With this book in particular, I never felt any urgency. That’s a function of how many derivative versions I’ve consumed. I’ve seen the movies, the television adaptations, and the parodies on The Simpsons. I’ve also listened to a recording of Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio broadcast.

In short, I felt a nagging duty to read it, but nothing more.

Having finally finished The War of the Worlds, I discovered that in some ways, the experience was superfluous. This is a short novel, coming in at around 200 pages, and it doesn’t have much in the way of plot. It is quite episodic, and the various filmed versions of this tale have ably captured the major beats. In other words, there wasn’t much left to surprise me, at least in terms of how it all unfolds.

What did surprise me was its execution. For all the meanings heaped upon Wells’s slim book, it is first and foremost brutally entertaining. This has the gloss – and sentence structure – of a classic. But at its heart, it’s really just a pulpy clash between aliens and humans.

***

A summary of The War of the Worlds is probably unnecessary. Suffice to say, at the end of the nineteenth century, cylinders from Mars begin burying themselves in the soil of Great Britain. From these cylinders emerge big-brained Martians, who immediately begin building war machines, which are then turned loose upon poor England.

The story is told in the first-person by an unnamed narrator. We never learn too much about him – characterizations are not a strong point here – except that he is a philosopher, and that he is married. Most of The War of the Worlds consists of the narrator’s own experiences as he tries to get back to his wife. Somewhat awkwardly, however, Wells also has his narrator spend time relating his brother’s travails, even though he wasn’t present for them. (There are some truly great scenes involving the brother, yet I found this second storyline a bit of an authorial cheat).

With our narrator as a guide, the reader is taken on a tour of a section of blasted-out Great Britain that really sets the bar for all the postapocalyptic fiction to follow. Showing an absurdly keen appreciation for local geography, Wells has his narrator travel from Woking to Weybridge, Weybridge to Halliford, Halliford to Putney, Putney to London, and so on and so forth. Along the way he witnesses battles between massed artillery and alien tripods; scrounges for food; gets trapped in a house with a raving curate (perhaps the most gripping set piece); and exchanges philosophical musings with an artilleryman who has lost his unit (and possibly a few marbles).

Wells’s descriptions – as has been widely noted elsewhere – eerily prefigure the mechanistic slaughters to come in both the First and Second World Wars. There is poison gas and shattered cities. There are mass exoduses of terrified civilian populations, with rioting and looting in the streets. Though this is not graphic in the modern sense, Wells writes with a certain unsparing ruthlessness. In one memorable scene, a British ironclad engages in a suicidal delaying action in the River Thames.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she was already among the Martians…They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through paper…

The evocation of total warfare and its aftermath is impressive, and Wells seems to take a bit of pleasure in fictionally destroying his real-life neighborhood.

***

Far more than most novels featuring aliens and Heat-Rays, The War of the Worlds requires close attention. This was published in 1898, and it shows. Wells employs a rather ornate, formal style, with long, compound sentences that often try to do too much. Occasionally, I had to read a page twice to understand what was actually happening (it can be especially hard to keep track of the unnamed characters). Despite its brevity, this took me longer to finish than expected. Still, there are certain sequences that have the taut pacing and tension of a thriller. Furthermore, while Wells can occasionally be a bit wordy, he uses those words to good effect, creating lasting images.

***

The War of the Worlds is one of those titles that is ripe for projection. Because it feels prophetic, there are many interpretations. The most obvious, of course, is that it is a critique of colonialism. After all, it features the world’s great imperial power being forcefully subjugated by a foreign invader. Wells pointedly suggests this himself in the text, referring to the Tasmanian people of Australia being “swept out of existence,” and then asking whether humans were “such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

This is all well and good, but it is worth mentioning that viewed from the twenty-first century, Wells has more than a bit of baggage. He was enamored of a certain construction of “natural selection” wherein all the “lesser” races would eventually disappear, a prospect he did not exactly mourn. Wells was also known as an anti-Semite, and some of that bleeds into these pages, especially in his description of an “eagle-faced man” who is run over by a fleeing cab while trying to pick up gold sovereigns that have spilled on the ground. For the most part, though, The War of the Worlds seems free of whatever reprehensible notions Wells carried. While there is definitely some Darwinian concepts interwoven into the narrative, the “natural selection” angle is played out vis-à-vis the conflict between humans and extra-terrestrials.

***

Science fiction has always been a marvelous vehicle for addressing real social concerns through entertainment. The War of the Worlds is no exception. As noted above, it can be seen as a criticism of imperialism, or of technology, or of any number of other things. Wells has built a foundation that can support many different structures. Steven Spielberg, for example, used Wells’s setup to create what is perhaps the best film to deal with America’s post-9/11 anxiety and dread. If you want to think deeply about it, you can. Based on the introduction to the edition I read, many have.

Just as importantly, you can choose to simply enjoy it – as I did – as the relatively lowbrow adventures of a man trying his best not to get blown up, while everything around him is spectacularly obliterated.

The classic Mars invasion of Earth tale, told in excruciating detail, from the viewpoint of the invaded England. One of the key Science Fiction books. In the 21st century, a fair bit of Well's works and writing are not ageing well, and I feel it's come to the point that older works, especially sci-fi need to be judged in the context of when they were written - and this was written in 1898! 6 out of 12.