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Jan 31, 2018CosmicEnergy rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
A classic science fiction piece, Wells' tale of a martian invasion of Earth is without a doubt the best known of the author's several outstanding books. Gigantic cylinders housing the martian colonists smash into Victorian England, bringing widespread destruction and death with them. The first part of the book switches between two characters: the narrator himself, who is accompanied by an artilleryman and then a curate, and the narrator's brother, who witnesses the general panic and mayhem as London is attacked by the Martians. At this point, Wells must be congratulated on his ability to realistically recreate the behavior of a mass of panic-stricken people, and the exodus of London is one of the most realistic scenes in the book. While the scene has all of the usual screaming crowds, Wells also portrays the pandemonium and the violence that humans are capable of when they are afraid: "Before [my brother] could get to [the horse], he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch's back. The driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran behind the cart." As the brother escapes to foreign lands, the narrator, in the second part of the book, discovers the cosmic scale of the martians' adeptness at engineering and technology, before the invaders eventually succumb to bacteria not found on Mars. Wells' imagination is what really gives this book life, as it seems unbelievable that all of this could have been thought of by a man living in the 1700s. However, upon finishing the book, a consistent reader of Wells can't help but feel unsatisfied. Compared to other books Wells has written, this one really shouldn't stand out, as while the ideas it presents are strange and fascinating, its characters can't hold a candle to the enchantingly surreal entities he conjures up in stories such as "The Time Machine" and "The Invisible Man". If anything, the story resembles an apocalyptic parody of the Little Prince in that its characters all seem to serve some higher, moralistic function that doesn't contribute to the plot. It's a shame, since while the idea was certainly momentous even by Wells' standards, the writing, for the most part, just doesn't cut it.