In February, during my journey thru Sci-Fi Time Travel novels, I reread H.G.Wells' The Time Machine , soon followed by Stephen Baxter's sequel, The Time Ships . Now that I'm reading works by writers I had included in my recent time travel adventures and who are also writers of non-time travel novels, I knew I'd be rereading Wells' The War of the Worlds before going on to Baxter's sequel to that novel, The Massacre of Mankind .
Like The Time Machine , I had last read The War of the Worlds in 2017. Naturally, I'd wanted to refresh my memory before going on to The Massacre of Mankind . It's amazing what five years can do to an old man's recollection.
Of course, Wells got a lot of the science wrong in the novel. That's to be expected. I suppose Martian creatures didn't seem so far fetched in 1897. Never the less, the book is a nice read; just imagine while reading the book that you're living in the time when bicycles were more ubiquitous than automobiles, the Wright Brothers hadn't made their first flight, and the "smart" people believed there were actually canals on Mars.
The nice thing about this novel is that Wells has humans behaving as humans.
Wells had stated that the idea for the book came to him after a discussion he had had with his brother Frank, regarding the effects the invading British had on the aboriginal Tasmanians during the 19th Century.What would happen if Great Britain were invaded by a superior civilization?
Thank goodness for earthly pathogens and microorganisms - the Martians were "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth" and all's well that ends well.
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