Written in 1897, The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories about mankind and aliens. Many consider this book to be the inception of the science fiction genre. This story is relatively straightforward: An unknown man is going about his life in jolly old England when aliens invade, causing chaos and destruction. How will this story end? Will humans overcome the aliens or will they all be captured, killed, or enslaved? The War of the Worlds starts off smashingly. HG Wells doesn’t need a ...

I swear that I read this when I was younger, but when I went to add this to Goodreads as a re-read (it was the January selection for my Completist Book Club), I did not find it in my list. And, because this is one of those books that has a plot people tend to know because of movies and/or its general pop culture relevance, it is difficult for me to know which parts of my memories of this are from the book and which are from other places. But, re-read or not, I am glad I read it in January 2022.T...

you've heard of The Book Was Better, now get ready for The Old-Timey Radio Adaptation Was Betterthis was very impressive for its time, but...hard to live up to a radio show so immersive and captivatingly realistic it tricked a bunch of dweebs from the past into thinking we were being invaded by aliens.2.5 stars--------------------tbr reviewone of the better first dates of my life involved going to look at a special moon event while listening to the radio adaptation of this book.the person it was...

“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 li...

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 t...

Paraphrasing Whitehead, I would say that the safest general characterisation of the science-fiction tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to H. G. Wells. Indeed, The War of the Worlds is probably the most influential novel of the whole science fiction genre, as well as a significant part of the horror category. I remember reading this short novel as a child and being viscerally engrossed and terrified. Rereading it now made me aware of a few more things. First, I realised how th...

Invading aliens have never been that ridiculously incompetent That´s an often seen problem in classic sci-fi, the authors didn´t really care about thinking too much about logic or readers' problems with suspension of disbelief, they just wanted to tell their story. As long as there were no other genre writers and they had the monopoly, that worked out quite well. But Aging well and growing old gracefully is a completely different thingMany old and classic sci fi has problems with realism, often...

Read as part of the Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003. The War of the Worlds goes beyond the of-the-time popular military invasion fiction, which took away the standard protagonist/antagonist arc of single characters and popped whole countries or tribes in their place, and brings down to Earth a whole new enemy at a time when science fiction did not exist and science itself was oft thought of as fiction.In Surrey, a professor is caught up in the invasio...

The War of the Worlds belongs to the league of immortal books.Tribal wars, civil wars, colonial wars… H.G. Wells managed to raise a phenomenon of war to the higher interplanetary level.The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of noises – the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam from the river, and as th...

I acknowledge that I am one of the few people who actually enjoyed the recent "War of the Worlds" movie. The reason for this has to do more with the original book than Tom Cruise or Steven Speilburg's tendency to wittle everything, including alien attacks, down to simple family problems. In a lot of ways, "War of the Worlds" (2006) was a close to dead-on adaptation of the original Victorian novel. Just a few words on why you should like, or if you don't like, respect "War of the Worlds" as a mov...