This is one of those classic novels that I have been meaning to read for years and finally got around to. Of course, I know the story from the movie versions and the Classics Illustrated comic adaptation that I read many times as a kid. I also remember that the comic edition had a short summary at the back describing the terror that was invoked by Orson Welles' radio production of the novel in the 1930s.
The book was well worth reading and was pretty much what I remembered with a lot more detail. The novel was first published in 1898 and introduced the theme of alien invasion that has had countless imitations since then. The plot is pretty simple with a strange disk landing near London that contains malevolent aliens able to build machines with a heat ray that is able to pretty much destroy humanity. The book goes into quite a bit of detail describing the Martians and their machines and weapons including a black gas that is a foreshadowing of the gas warfare in WWI. The aliens also bring the seeds for a red-hued Martian plant that seems to easily adapt and take over the native flora. Of course, in the end the Martians are destroyed by earthly bacteria that is lacking on Mars.
I did enjoy this but sometimes got lost and uninterested in the narrator's wanderings around the myriad number of locations around London that I had no knowledge of. Wells was a pioneer of science fiction and I have read most of his other well-known scifi and I can now add War of the Worlds to the list.
The book was well worth reading and was pretty much what I remembered with a lot more detail. The novel was first published in 1898 and introduced the theme of alien invasion that has had countless imitations since then. The plot is pretty simple with a strange disk landing near London that contains malevolent aliens able to build machines with a heat ray that is able to pretty much destroy humanity. The book goes into quite a bit of detail describing the Martians and their machines and weapons including a black gas that is a foreshadowing of the gas warfare in WWI. The aliens also bring the seeds for a red-hued Martian plant that seems to easily adapt and take over the native flora. Of course, in the end the Martians are destroyed by earthly bacteria that is lacking on Mars.
I did enjoy this but sometimes got lost and uninterested in the narrator's wanderings around the myriad number of locations around London that I had no knowledge of. Wells was a pioneer of science fiction and I have read most of his other well-known scifi and I can now add War of the Worlds to the list.
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