The War of the Worlds

I happened to find a nice, somewhat old H.G. Wells collection at Powell's in the "new arrivals" section a few weeks back, and brought it home with me. I'd already read The Time Machine and liked it well enough, and this one also had The War of the Worlds and some short stories. I like a well put-together collection.

The War of the Worlds was a pretty incredible read, especially now, 120 or so years (can you believe it?) after it was written. It was fairly unsettling to read about aliens attacking a pre-automotive society, and the descriptions of horse-and-cart jams on unpaved roads as people try to escape the menace. It almost seemed unreal, as though someone today were trying very hard to write about that time...the absence of technology in the victims was conspicuous when compared to the aliens'. And the imagining of the aliens was all the more awing when you think of how few machines or mechanical devices there were to base them on. The aliens in their war-machines were described as being more like a brain controlling a body than like a man controlling a machine, which would have been a more apt simile, if there had been man-driven machines at the time - but there weren't!

I also loved the little idiosyncrasies of life back then, and the different notions that were so apparent. The narrator at one point describes himself as "Naked save for my water-soaked trousers and socks"...which would really not be considered naked these days. And I loved when the first man to see the cylinder from Mars wasn't believed because he was running around like a madman with no hat on his head. *gasp!*

Mrs. Elphinstone is a great character too...I laughed at how she "had never been out of England before...and seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and Martians might prove very similar."

Another gem of a sentence is when the narrator's brother finds that "It was no time for pugilistic chivalry." Quite so.

What I loved most about the book was how Wells wrote it like I would write a story of the destruction of civilization - about his friends and family and the place he lived, as though it were all happening to the author himself. And that, I think, is why it rings so eerily possible, even today.