This is cross-posted from my personal journal. I persuaded a friend to listen to H G Wells’s A Dream of Armageddon, which was on BBC Radio 7. She loved it so much she asked me for some more H G Wells recs, and how could I say no to that?
I own 14 of his books, but of those I own I’ve only actually read 6 (including a complete collection of his short stories). The others were all bought in the last month, and I simply haven’t got to them yet amongst the rest of my somewhat epic reading list. I don’t have War of the Worlds or The First Men in the Moon but I have read both.
Why do I like him so much? Well, firstly, he’s psychic. I refer you to the preface of War in the Air:
Preface to the 1921 Edition
A shot preface the The War in the Air has become necessary if the reader is to do justice to that book. It is one of a series of stories I have written at different times: The World Set Free is another, and When the Sleeper Wakes a third; which are usually written of as ‘scientific romances’ or ‘futurist romances’, but which it would be far better to call ‘fantasias of possibilities’. They take some developing possiblity in human affairs and work it out so as t develop the broad consequences of that possibility. This War in the Air was written, the reader should note, in 1907, and it began to appear as a serial story in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1908. This was before the days of the flying machine; Bleriot did not cross the Channel until July 1909; and the Zeppelin ship was still in its infancy. The reader will find it amusing now to compare the guesses and notions of the author with the acheived realties of today.
….
I ask the reader to remember that date of 1907 also when he reads of Prince Karl Albert and the Graf von Winterland. Seven years before the Great War, its shadow stood out upon our sunny wolrd as plainly as all that, for the ‘imaginative novellist’ – or any one else with ordinary common sense – to see. The great catastrophe marched upon us in the daylight. But everbody thought that somebody else would stop it before it really arrived. Behind that great catastrophe march others today. The steady deterioration of currency, the shrinkage of production, the ebb of educational energy in Europe, work out to consequences that are obvious to every clear-headed man. National and imperialist rivalries march whole nations at the quickstep towards social collapse. The process goes on as plainly as the militarist process was going on in the years when The War in the Air was written.
Do we still trust to sombody else?
H.G.WELLS
Easton Glebe, 1921
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