The War of the Worlds

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Berkley Publishing Corporation, Nov 15, 1977 - Fiction - 173 pages

First published serially in 1897, H. G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds", is one of the author's most popular and enduring works. When explosions are observed on Mars at an astronomical observatory the interest of the scientific community is greatly aroused. It is soon discovered, when they land on Earth, that the explosions are rocket like projectiles that have been launched from Mars. An unnamed protagonist is one of the first to discover that these are actually spaceships carrying monstrous beings from the planet. The story centers on the unnamed narrator's attempt to reunite with his wife after witnessing the devastating attacks that soon follow. The merciless Martians storm the countryside in three-legged fighting machines that fire deadly heat rays and spew poisonous black smoke. Thousands of refugees are sent fleeing in the chaos created by the invasion. Inspired by the English invasion literature of his area, Wells's "The War of the Worlds" crafts a thrilling and foreboding narrative that helped to popularize and define an entire genre of literature. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.


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About the author (1977)

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former lady's maid. Although "Bertie" left school at fourteen to become a draper's apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher's salary. His other "scientific romances"--The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908)--won him distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me."

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