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The Time Machine, Wells' first novel (published in 1895) and The War Of The Worlds (1898), comprise two great firsts in the history of science fiction. Respectively, they were the first novels to center around time travel and the first to suggest intelligent extraterrestrial life and interplanetary invasion. The Time Machine When the Time Traveler boldly steeped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the far future and in an almost unrecognizable world. In another, more utopian age, creatures seemed to live together free of strife and competition. The Time Traveler thought he could learn the secrets of these happy beings and take the lessons of life to his own time - until he discovered that his marvelous invention, his only means of escape, had been stolen. The War of the Worlds "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. . ." So begins The War of the Worlds, the novel that made Wells famous and has enthralled and terrified for almost 100 years. Ten huge and tireless creatures land in England and, using their deadly rays and crushing strength, threaten the very existence of humankind. Well's classic is not just groundbreaking science fiction, it is a shocking social parable about man's inhumanity to man.… (more)
Many credit Wells as the father of the modern genre of science fiction. One needs to only learn these two tutors alone have produced several movies, TV shows, even radio. ( )
I wasn't the biggest fan of The Time Machine, I felt like there was only one bit that I enjoyed. The War of the Worlds is what saved this for me, I enjoyed quite a bit more. I think it was the little bit of horror elements in The War of the Worlds that made me like that one. ( )
Personally, I enjoyed The Time Machine better than The War of the Worlds. I found that often Wells would divert the story onto a tangent more in War of the Worlds. The Time Machine was more straightforward and any tangents were more directly related to the main story. The War of the Worlds took entire chapters away from the main character to focus on a brother whose fate is never revealed. ( )
I know these stories are classic, and I know he was writing in the 1890s, but does the narrator have to spend half of his time talking about how he's better than everyone else, and the other half fretting about humankind becoming less "manly"?
Some of the short stories at the end (the "Connections") are clever, though. (They're also by other people.) ( )
I only read The Time Machine. More philosopical musing on the future of man than science fiction with a big adventure story thrown in. This was for book group so I'll see what everyone else thinks.
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? .... Are we or they Lords of the World? .... And how are all things made for man? ...
~ Kepler (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
Dedication
First words
War of the Worlds: No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligence 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.
Quotations
Last words
The Time Machine:
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still loved on in the heart of man.
The Time Machine, Wells' first novel (published in 1895) and The War Of The Worlds (1898), comprise two great firsts in the history of science fiction. Respectively, they were the first novels to center around time travel and the first to suggest intelligent extraterrestrial life and interplanetary invasion. The Time Machine When the Time Traveler boldly steeped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the far future and in an almost unrecognizable world. In another, more utopian age, creatures seemed to live together free of strife and competition. The Time Traveler thought he could learn the secrets of these happy beings and take the lessons of life to his own time - until he discovered that his marvelous invention, his only means of escape, had been stolen. The War of the Worlds "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. . ." So begins The War of the Worlds, the novel that made Wells famous and has enthralled and terrified for almost 100 years. Ten huge and tireless creatures land in England and, using their deadly rays and crushing strength, threaten the very existence of humankind. Well's classic is not just groundbreaking science fiction, it is a shocking social parable about man's inhumanity to man.
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Although they are valued for sheer narrative excitement and suspense in the tradition of Poe, and for astonishing prophecy and realistic fantasy as inventive as Vern's, the stories of H. G. Wells are emphatically and frighteningly underscored by his self-avowed intent to shatter "That serene confidence in the future which is the most abundant source of decadence."
The Martians' descent in The War of the Worlds (1898) with its savagery and "welter of atrocities" systematically blasted the peak of self-satisfaction that England achieved during the nineteenth century.
The Time Machine (1895), Wells' first book, also projected the consequences of self-indulgence through the flaccid future Children of Light who are horribly subsumed by Morlocks, their drudging, monstrously cruel counterparts.
Wells thought the immediate collective madness of The War of the Worlds the best introduction to his works, and so it here precedes the glittering ironies of its futuristic companion. England's nineteenth-century smuggery may well have been assaulted, but this century, well on the way to Wells' worlds, may shudder too - simply by turning the pages of this book.
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