The War in the Air (1908)

Read this online. Intriguing and slightly odd that Wells chooses and is able to write this as a mix of small-time comedy and world catastrophe scenario. It sort of works, perhaps like Chaplin's Dictator or the film Life is Beautiful. Schweik is another. There are two perspectives though: the catastrophe is mostly seen from a distance in documentary style, sort I'd pseudo non-fiction/historical voice, while the innocent bumbler caught up in it is seen close up in anecdotal manner. The personal story is great fun whereas the world historical passages, though elegantly expressed don't really catch light and one is always comparing the prophesy to reality of the 20th century. As prophecy it does have quite a bit going for it. The great powers bumbling into war presages August 1914, 7 or 8 years after he wrote. Aerial bombardment, specifically carpet bombing, didn't get going till Guernica and WWII but his descriptions are convincing.the flu of 1918 can stand in for Wels' pestilence The regression to the Dark Ages hasn't happened yet but who knows? Less convincing is the idea that a mechanic with a stolen set of blueprints can overturn the power of scientific warmongering, though perhaps Vietnam is a case in point. Prescient amid this is the way populations go on resisting as the bombs rain down, London in the blitz, Germany 1945, as well as Vietnam have shown the truth of that. ( )

This certainly isn't the best Wells novel: it takes a good while to get going and then mars a fascinating middle section with a very rushed and unsatisfactory ending, but then I don't read Wells for the narrative structure, I read for his ideas. H.G. Wells was an incredible ideas man, something he certainly demonstrates here. Written in 1907, this novel demonstrates remarkable foresight. While Wells (who was famously dismissive of the future of aviation) imagines fleets of airships rather than planes, the scenario he imagines does anticipate much of the history of the twentieth century with whole cities bombed out and urban civilians experiencing war in a much more immediate and devastating way than ever before.

Wells' "hero" is Bert Smallways, a small-minded man from Bun Hill. An unlikely collision finds Bert trapped in a balloon gradually billowing towards Germany, a nation on the eve of war, with the plans for a remarkable flying machine suddenly in his possession. Like Bert's journey, the plot of this novel is frustratingly meandering in places but I generally enjoyed the contrast between Bert's haplessness and the deadly global arena of war in which he inadvertently finds himself. I'll admit it too, I loved the descriptions of the airships and all the various flying contraptions. However impractical there is something fascinating and majestic about airships and Wells captures that tone brilliantly here. There is a powerful and moving anti-war message running through the whole piece but I'm glad that the aftermath of the twentieth century's two world wars wasn't quite as bleak as the novel imagines. The novel feels dated now but if you're interested in twentieth-century history you may find this an interesting alternate imagining and yes, damn it, if you just like great big crazy steampunk airships you'll probably enjoy it too. ( )

It's kind of a shame that H. G. Wells wrote this after The War of the Worlds, because The War in the Air is essentially a much less original and much more direct deconstruction of the invasion fiction genre.  Wells has a very specific target in The War in the Air: stories about aerial combat, and he in fact directly mentions George Griffith's The Outlaws of the Air as a book the protagonist, Bert Smallways, enjoyed as a kid.  Later, there's a much more veiled reference where Bert suggests that the disappearance of geniuses could be due to them being abducted by a secret society, which is basically the plot of Griffith's Angel of the Revolution; the person Bert is talking to thinks this is nonsense. 

And that is basically Wells's project here in a nutshell: to substitute new stories for old ones.  There's a lot of references to the fact that people's minds are determined by the stories they read, and Wells took issue with how stories like Griffith's Angel depicted aerial combat in such a fanciful way.  It's impossible, Wells says here, for aerial bombardment to be so controlled, or for only one nation to obtain the technology; Wells tells a tale of an Earth devoured by a massively confusing total war, where anyone can destroy anyone-- but no one can occupy territory, and thus the war will never end.  As usual, Wells gets some things very right and some things very wrong.  The sense he must have had of science fiction as a nascent genre in 1908 is very impressive; he draws together a lot of trends and inverts them in a way that many subsequent authors have failed to notice, I think.

Aside from that, it's also an entertaining book.  The early chapters are funny, as Bert Smallways serves as a distant witness to the technological changes of the England of 191–, and I loved the character of Alfred Butteridge, who has invented heavier-than-air flight, but spends most of his time spelling his name for reporters and talking about his love affair, which the British public would rather not hear about.  The middle kind of drags, but once Bert ends up on Goat Island at Niagara Falls* the book gets sharp again, as we see what it takes to strip civilization away from hapless Bert Smallways.  There's a couple quite chilling and tense scenes near the end, which caps the whole thing off rather well.  In terms of imagination, it's not one of Wells's most striking, but that doesn't stop it from being among his best.

* This is where the characters of Jules Verne's Master of the World ended up just four years prior, which might be significant as I think Wells is parodying Verne's Robur with Butteridge, but it might just mean that Niagara Falls suddenly got popular with Europeans in the early 20th century.  I don't actually know anything about the history of Niagara.  I actually read Master of the World and The War in the Air simultaneously, and this coincidence of setting made jumping back and forth fairly confusing.  (Also, my father-in-law got married there.)

Wells presents a very gloomy and uncannily accurate picture of the horrors of modern aerial warfare in a novel written in 1908 at the very beginning of the history of mechanical flight. But the descriptions were too long, the plot too thin and the characters uninteresting. About three quarters of the way through, I stopped trying to plough my way through this morass into which an initially powerful idea had degenerated, though I did skim the final section which describes in stark post-apocalyptic terms the disintegration of society after the War in the Air. In sum, a novel whose promise was unfulfilled. ( )

It's dated in style, but the chirpy Cockney narrator bumbling through the end of the world is a gimmick that works surprisingly well. The plot manages to be both ridiculous and yet believable enough to be extremely unnerving in time. If you ignore some of the racial prejudice, bits of this book are surprisingly pertinent; the dangers of technology and the problems disruption to society via a major conflict could cause are admirably explored in this novel. ( )