Digital Rare Book:
The War of the Worlds
By Herbert George Wells
Published William Heinemann, London - 1898

War of the Worlds was written in response to several historical events. The most important was the unification and militarization of Germany, which led to a series of novels predicting war in Europe, beginning with George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871). Most of these were written in a semi-documentary fashion; and Wells borrowed their technique to tie his interplanetary war tale to specific places in England familiar to his readers. This attempt at hyper-realism helped to inspire Orson Welles when the latter created his famed 1938 radio broadcast based on the novel.

There was a specific event that inspired Wells. In 1894 Mars was positioned particularly closely to Earth, leading to a great deal of observation and discussion. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had reported seeing "canali" on Mars, meaning "channels," but the term was mistranslated as "canals," leading to much speculation about life on the red planet. [Although scientists were able eventually to photograph what seem to be large stream beds on Mars, these are on a much smaller scale than the blobs and blotches which misled Schiaparelli into thinking he had seen channels.] One of the 1894 observers, a M. Javelle of Nice, claimed to have seen a strange light on Mars, which further stimulated speculation about life there. Wells turned Javelle into Lavelle of Java, an island much on people's minds because of the explosion there in 1883 of Mount Krakatoa, which killed 50,000 people and drastically influenced Earth's climate for the next year.

Wells became famous partly as a prophet. In various writings he predicted tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, and--in this novel--gas warfare, laser-like weapons, and industrial robots. It was his tragedy that his most successful predictions were of destructive technologies, and that he lived to experience the opening of the atomic age in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wells was to become famous as a socialist and a utopian, but his science fiction novels are almost uniformly pessimistic about human nature and the future.


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