Rating: 3
I’m wrapping up this challenge with one of my favorite categories: Science Fiction.
Selecting an author was difficult because there’s a wide range who fall into science fiction. I settled on H. G. Wells because I’ve already read a lot of mid-20th century sci-fi authors, and of the more recent books I’ve tried I haven’t really enjoyed them. So I opted for something a little more classic.
The War of the Worlds is not what I expected based on references in movies and other media. Fully expecting a rather dryly presented account of an alien invasion from Mars, I was surprised to see the focus much more on the social aspects of the crisis. This shift took a long time to build up to, or at least a long time in a book that’s less than 200 pages. The first third of the book is simply documentation that, despite its otherworldly information, did not hold my attention very well. When the effects on society started coming into it, however, the story became much more interesting.
This book has to be approached with the time period in mind to be enjoyable. Even the modern-day reader with the most basic of astronomical and cosmological knowledge (you can put me into that category) will find the premise of the story laughable if taken too seriously. Wells uses theories that work for the day with the limited knowledge they had available to patch together a story that has enough science in it to make the reader follow along, but his stories are very much more about the fiction, and in this case fiction as social commentary. Science fiction has always been one of the genres that is most capable of standing back and looking at humanity as a whole, possibly because of its accessibility to aliens and other forms of “the other”.
The panic described seemed very accurate and real. Hell, people trample each other for a good sale on Black Friday, imagine what they would do if a Martian was trying to kill them? It was also interesting to see the different types of characters the narrator ran into. From the cowardly curate to the artillery man who could talk big but not get past a big dream with a bottle in-hand, this story looked at the individuals of a crumbling society just as well as it looked at the whole.
Back to the science side of things, I thought the construction of the Martians was really interesting, and the explanation for how they might have evolved into what was more or less a brain that created its own bodies. An eerie prediction these days, when most of the world spends 50% of their time or more with an electrical device in their hand or in front of them.
Overall, the dry language and documentary-esque narration was not my favorite, which hindered my enjoyment of this book, but the story itself was interesting and even at moments kind of scary. I’m glad I read it and may read another Wells book in the future.
This of course sums up my Read the Store challenge, and I am very excited about that. I will write a full summary of it in a few days. For now, thanks for reading – I hope you got a little enjoyment out of my book ramblings this year.
This post has been a part of my Read the Store Challenge for 2014.
If you have a Goodreads account, please feel free to friend me. I’m always looking for more book friends.
Life Flails 