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MurfSpud
Literacy
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07-2004
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North Wales coast, UK
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H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
I often see that one of my favourite authors is frequently overlooked on many online resources. In my opinion, his greatest work (out of his many works) was "The War of the Worlds".
This book was written in 1898 in Victorian London by a man who lived in a civilisation which was nowhere near as advanced as ours is today. Imagine if you can, a man who rides a horse into town to market, talking about the concepts of battlefield lasers, interstellar invasion, time travel and genetic experimentation (as in "The Invisible Man").
His style of writing is kept in the original context in his books, the old style of English from the Victorian era, which really adds to the impact of his stories.
I will quote the first page of "The War of the Worlds", just to give you an idea of his style.
"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were 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 affairs 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. 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 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."
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"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein
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Nov/6/2004, 8:48 am
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