Customer Reviews

War Of The Worlds

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was one of the first books I read as a child, and it is still one of my favorite bed time stories. Wells wrote his famous chronicle of the Martian invasion of Victorian Britain at the turn of the century, and the world has since gradually chipped at the book's scientific authenticity. The book, however, still stands tall even today as a dramatic vision of the collapse of civilization. Well's vivid description of the destruction, the terror, and the agonies of humankind's slow death at the hands of the Martians chills the blood. It has never been truly matched. Wells also created one of the great books of all time representing themes ( genocide, the possible extinction of humanity, the dominance of science over humanity, the yearning to explore the universe and spread the seeds of life to other worlds) which would haunt the next century. Events like the holocaust, the splitting of the atom and the cold war, and Kennedy's dream to send man to the moon make "War of the Worlds" seem prophetic. Even the book's conclusion appears today like an eerie warning of the dangers in harvesting the potential of biological weapons. While other science fiction has become outdated and forgotten, Well's book, even after more than 100 years, continues to present a contemporary message for society.

Science fiction plays two roles for the reader. The more familiar one is to provide a perspective on the future implications of technology and to raise new issues and choices. The less familiar is in providing a context for evaluating what we now see from the wrong perspective.

All science fiction inevitably becomes dated in the first dimension. The truly great science fiction retains its strength in the second sense. I have rated The War of the Worlds with five stars solely for that second value.

Regardless of its currently creaky scientific perspective, Wells did an astonishing good job of extending upon the knowledge available to him in the late 18th century. Manned flight had not yet occurred, and he was providing plausible concepts of interplanetary travel. The discussions of the impact of a planet's distance from the sun on the timing of the evolution of life, distance on the timing of life's destruction, and on how gravity will affect space travelers are superb.

Let me mention that I had the great good fortune to hear this book read in an audio cassette editon by Alexander Spencer, and that reading greatly added to my enjoyment of the book. Mr. Spencer was able to capture the emotional ups and downs of the novel very well, and that makes it much more immediate. If you have not heard this novel read aloud, I strongly urge you to do so.

The story line of the novel is exceptionally well developed around the theme of what it really means to be human. The war with the Martians becomes a source of stress that allows us to look behind the social mask of civilization to consider the moral state that people have arrived at. In many ways, he also uses the Martians as a counterpoint for considering what we might become. This is masterfully done. He adds to the metaphor by continuingly referring to various bacteria, insects, and animals as our counterparts, our superiors, and our victims. The comparisons are worthy of Socrates.

I was fascinated to see the eloquent plea for realizing our symbiotic relationship to nature. This is turned into a very powerful argument for environmental restraint just at the end of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and demonstrates remarkable prescience.

Wells also looks at humans from the perspective of our minds, our bodies, and our spirits. He has the greatest faith for our minds in this regard. Science, for him, is the great hope.

The story is well plotted, as well. Those who enjoy a good sack of the city along the lines of Godzilla or King Kong will find the War of the Worlds rewarding. I particularly appreciated Wells' skill in keeping the narrator and his brother near the center of the action.

To enjoy this book as an adventure tale the most, you will have to ignore the implausible parts of the story and the unending lists of place names in England. I didn't find that to be too much of a price to pay. After a while the places started to seem familiar. Perhaps looking them up on a map would help.

After you have finished reading this story, I think you will find it helpful to speculate how the 21st century human population would probably react to alien visitors to the Earth. I found that my own reaction was to reflect on how much progress we have made in moving away from thinking of humans as the life center of the universe in the last 100 years. But we have a long way to go. Perhaps we can only truly make significant progress when we first find extraterrestrial life superior to our own.

Another useful line of thinking is to imagine that we will meet superior extraterrestrial life in the future. What should we be working on now?

Think ahead to gain the most!

The Book That Began Sci-Fi
This is a book way ahead of its time. It chronicles the invasion of Earth by the inhabitants of neighbouring Mars, from the point of view of the anonymous protagonist. Some of the ideas may seem somewhat inane upon reading the book presently, but bear in mind that it was written over a hundred years ago, where the concept of interaction with extra-terrestrial beings was thoroughly infantile.
The book is seemingly written as a documentary with the hard-hitting authenticity of a late-night news bulletin as opposed to a fantastical yarn spattered with conspicuously impracticable fairytale imagery. This therefore creates a tangible sense of realism that causes the reader to wonder how they might have fared were they thrust into the same situation.
Wells manages to keep the suspense mounting throughout, exploring the reaction of tense and fearful pre-WW1 humanity to the physical embodiment and culmination of their apprehensions, and the novel concludes in a way rather pleasingly unexpected, and that could almost serve to be the twisted moral of this paranoid parable.
If you are looking for a book in which you can examine character developments and interactions, then The War Of The Worlds is at best inappropriate. However, it is a valuable contrivance insofar as instigating speculation as to mankind's position in the universe, and indeed the position of those civilizations and cultures traditionally or habitually thought of as subservient to one's own.
The casual reader might have some difficulty with Wells' linguistic manner, and indeed may have only come across some of the vocabulary used through listening to MatronsApron, yet Wells still manages to explain events thoroughly and concisely.
To conclude, then, The War Of The Worlds is a literary landmark that unquestionably invented the entire science fiction genre, and should appeal to fans of action, fans of adventure, fans of science fiction, and conspiracy theorists alike. With this book, H.G. Wells has proven to be a social commentator, sublime documentarian, sci-fi pioneer, and a splendid storyteller.

Exellent Si-Fi Book Sure to capture the readers imagination.Even Thogh it takes place 100 years ago,and man has a better understanding of our solar system and space travel,It still gives us a fear of what we lack in technolgy could be the death of us.

It is ironic and yet totally appropriate that the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories remains the most realistic of them all in that humanity is saved because the Martians have no immunity against our diseases. While that simply explanation may or may not explain what happened to the dinosaurs we do know that the arrival of Europeans in the New World introduced small pox and other diseases which decimated the Native American populations, primarily in the eastern part of the continent. However biological truth only gets in the way of good science fiction so that alien encounters in the worlds of "Star Trek" and "Farscape" rarely worry about speaking the local language or breathing the local air, let alone falling prey to the local diseases.

Written by H.G. Wells in 1898, "The War of the Worlds" also has arguably the most famous opening line in science fiction history, although I am sure most of us always hear the voice of Orson Welles intoning the words, "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" (my second choice would probably be "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time" as long as we are on that topic). The other major contribution to the alien invasion genre Wells provides is the idea that these strange visitors from another planet come because it is Earth that has something special that they need; in this case it is the delicacy of human blood, sucked from living beings (which begs the question, did the Martians know we were such tasty treats or did they just luck out by traveling to their closest neighbor in the solar system?).

Isaac Asimov argued that "The War of the Worlds" could be read as an argument against British colonialism as the empire expanded to the point where the sun never set upon it. By the end of the 19th-century the British Empire covered a quarter of the land area and the population of the world, and while this is an intriguing parallel it does not strike me as being particularly profitable since the analogy is rather subtle and I would think most of his British readers would have entirely missed the point. Given the omnipresent idea of futurism in Wells' writing it is more worthwhile to look at the issues of mortality, humanity's place in the natural order, and the potential evils of technology.

While rereading "The War of the Worlds" to consider it for a Science Fiction class completely devoted to novels about the Red Planet, I was rather surprised to rediscover that it is a good yarn. The fact that his stories hold up, not just as escapist fantasies or scientific romances but as stories that continue to be relevant critiques of both the time in which he wrote and the times in which we live, only serves to confirm the place of H.G. Wells as not just one of the greatest names in science fiction, but also as a social critics and visionary futurist.

In my opinion this is an excellant book. I should know I've read it eight times in the past four months. It's a must read book. It discusses the effect of the World when Martians invade. It evolves around one character and his determination to return to his wife in Leatherhead, England. The Martians that have invaded use these wicked weapons such as the heat-ray and poisen gas. You should read it, it's rather enjoyable to the science fiction fan and to fans of H.G. Wells also.