War of the Worlds

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called 'H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time'. The book is also fully illustrated with a wealth of beautiful drawings. Mr. H. G. Wells wears his skeleton of scientific knowledge so palpably on the outside that the most erratic flights of his imagination are received with a docile hushfulness accorded to few of the inventive. In The War of the Worlds, with clean-cut, stirring language, he discusses the exquisite possibilities of a bombardment of London by the planet Mars. The outrage upon experience which, with the gravity of a Swift, he calls upon us to accept is so tremendous and far-reaching as to counteract the effect of humorous details and leave a sense of horror and baffled intelligence. Over a track of forty million miles, in obedience to predictions at Lick Observatory, are shot missiles, or cylinders, which on arrival unscrew from the inside and liberate living Martians, 'bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons and feeble musculature,' who generate a devastating Heat-Ray accompanied by puffs of green smoke, and from their gun-like tubes shower canisters of black gas. The Telegraph and the Times give fair warning, and a curate expostulates ' Why are these things permitted?' but in vain. From the hail of projectiles there is safety only in the underground railway and the Thames, though the latter is scalding hot if one of the toadish, bedevil-fished ' bipeds' dips into it so much as a foot. Just when, as a superfluous artillery man said, it threatens to be 'up' with humanity-no more ' blessed concerts,' picture exhibits, or anything-and the strangers with the V-shaped mouths and oily brown skins, deprived of their accustomed excess of oxygen, are becoming inured to the increased weight of their bodies, they disappear, and are found piled, with their war machines ...