The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells
17% recommend78% neutral4% critical
The ultimate science fiction classic: for more than one hundred years, this compelling tale of the Martian invasion of Earth has enthralled readers with a combination of imagination and incisive commentary on the imbalance of power that continues to be relevant today. The style is revolutionary for its era, employing a sophisticated first and third person account of the events which is both personal and focused on the holistic downfall of Earth's society. The Martians, as evil, mechanical and unknown a threat they are, remain daunting in today's society, where, despite technology's mammoth adv
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…the often overlooked SF classic. It does occasionally squeak onto a list but is still sadly often overlooked :( Also no HG Wells, Verne, Silverberg or Bob Shaw books on the list? Certainly would have War of the Worlds and A Time of Changes on mine.
on “The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)” ↗The War of The Worlds, H.G. Wells, 1898 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861 Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"), A. Einstein, 1905
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?” ↗…eventually realized I must have read it long ago and totally forgotten it. I've read thousands of books, but I never kept a log and have no way of remembering them all. The standout in my mind, however, is "War of the Worlds" by Wells. It is the first scifi book I ever read, picking it out at the library because it had a cool illustration of the tripod on the cover. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and like the purported first hit…
on “Science Fiction Books I’ve Read (2018)” ↗…those tools are actually autonomous. There no AI commenters here or anywhere, it is always humans causing that slop to be posted. Anyway, this idea goes back to long before The Matrix, try H G Wells The War of the Worlds, ably voiced by David Essex and Richard Burton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAwrLzhnzQ
on “Nowhere Is Safe” ↗…From what I can tell this dates back to before there were actual space programs, so I strongly suspect this has to do with the science fiction in the respective languages. For example in H.G. Wells 1898 War of the Worlds, the bad guys are from Mars, Edgar Rice Burroghs John Carter series is about Mars, etc. whereas engineer cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktsitov wrote that when he was 10 (~1936) he came to a sad realization.…
on “Momentum is building to explore Venus” ↗…earliest pieces of science fiction. This is "The Sky Pirate", by Garrett P. Serviss, better known for "Edison's Conquest of Mars". That one was intended as an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's 1987 "War of the Worlds". "The Sky Pirate" was serialized in newspapers, and never published as a book. I brought back the first 3 chapters from Library of Congress scans of microfilms of newspapers from 2011. The Library of…
on “Japanese bookstore simulator translated into English after 24 years” ↗…biospheres is ... well, there's a very good chance that they would find us crunchy to snack upon, rather than vice versa. (I'm thinking at a microbiological level. H. G. Wells hit the hammer on the nail with "War of the Worlds" in more ways than one.)
on “A Cultural Thought Experiment” ↗Just finished Little Brother, in the middle of The War of the Worlds right now, and I plan to tackle Cryptonomicon once the semester starts winding down. I also read You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier recently, which is a great read.
on “Ask HN: What are you reading right now?” ↗And doing it in SF is as old as the genre itself - Wells wrote War of the Worlds so that he could criticize British colonialism at one remove.
on “The Future According to Stanisław Lem” ↗…people would speak to their browser for example. [0]: An example sentence is "a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the bottom of the body of the cylinder", which is from H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.
on “Project Common Voice” ↗> Sci-Fi basically didn't exist before 1940. Um, seriously? What genre would you place either of The War of the Worlds or 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, then? That the books manage to get a lot of things wrong doesn't really alter the fact that they were early, very popular examples of science fiction (and there were a…
on “Letter from Orwell to his publisher regarding 1984” ↗…E.g., fantasy about computing, robots, etc. is not taken at all seriously here at HN but was taken seriously by much of the US population in the famous radio broadcast of the H. G. Wells story, IIRC War of the Worlds, about an invasion of robots from Mars. Net, now, with the Internet, we have much more information. E.g., for me, since I have no dead fish heads to wrap, my kitty cat has plenty of cat litter, and…
on “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)” ↗…Tolkein didn't really have a previous Tolkein to inspire him, and their motivations were completely different. Go further back to authors like H.G. Wells, and most of the characters didn't even have names (War of the Worlds and The Time Machine had very few named characters, for instance).
on “Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015)” ↗I think I get that. War of the worlds by H.G. Wells was a terrible book to read through as well. Groundbreaking, but also forgettable.
on “Apple TV+ to adapt William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer” ↗1897 is when H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” was published in serialized form on both sides of the Atlantic. UFOs and Martians were very much in the Zeitgeist when this alleged Texas incident occurred.
on “The Alien Grave of Aurora, Texas” ↗