The War of the Worlds (Signet Classics)

Good book. Its great for reading the past in the beginning of the WOTW.

One of if not the 1st alien invasion book ever! The one that started sci-fi for all! And it was a great platform for imagination for generations to come. A timeless classic.

This isn’t the best book I’ve ever read, but I found it to be a relatively quick read and pretty enjoyable. The pacing is a bit slow in the beginning, but it picks up by the end. Wells develops pretty interesting themes and ideas, especially in the second half of the book. The edition is solid and affordable. I didn’t particularly enjoy the introduction or the afterword. They talked a lot about the historical context of the book and discussed science fiction in general, but I would’ve been more interested to hear about some of the literary qualities of the story. I appreciated the introduction discussing Wells’ characterization and how he was building off a genre of fiction called “invasion fiction.” I would have liked the introduction or afterword to cover more ground like that. This was a good read. I picked it up because you hear so much about War of the Worlds, and I wanted to know if it was any good. Personally, I found it enjoyable and I’m glad I got the chance to read it.

No printing errors, visually interesting cover, and it's War of the Worlds. Durable spine, but it's still a paperback, so don't put it through too much torture.

I loved both movies, yes I am in the camp that watched and loved the movies first. The version with Tom Cruise is one of may all time favorite movies, so I came into reading this novel with the bias of those movies. The timeline of when Wells wrote this book makes it amazing in that sense. Very few novels have stood for so long and impacted entertainment as much as this one. It is a true testament to the writing of Wells for a science fiction novel to stand for so long. A crime or war story or a romance can more easily survive mans evolution in writing far better than science fiction, but this book has done just that so in that sense this book is certainly a classic. However to read it and compare my own personal enjoyment or how much I was drawn into the story its not a good read. I found it hard to read and not because of science terms or outdated scientific beliefs or theories, but just the writing style of Wells. In my opinion he didn't develop the relationships of humans, or of the main character of of the villain sufficiently. Sometimes it was the language differences of my American English in 2000 and British English of 1900. I felt Wells spent more time trying to give me a map of England, but didn't describe it well enough and it would have helped me if I literally had a map of England because the places seemed to be more important than the people or the aliens. I also didn't feel like the reactions of the people were reasonable in time of horror and despair, I dont know, maybe Englanders act different than us Americans but I dont think so when it comes to those emotions. I found myself skipping paragraphs....that is not good for me.

Excellent read. Truly timeless or so it seems. Very worthwhile and stimulating. Makes me appreciate what we have. And what we might lose someday

Required school book. Book was good quality and he enjoyed reading it.

4/5 because the book was tiny, which wasn’t expected, but the actual contents are a 5/5 for me! Really enjoyed this take on an otherworldly invasion of the U.K.!

Good book

Superb quality, 5* and A++++ for the seller's customer service.

Bought for my 14 year old son. A book he should be familiar with and I am sure he will enjoy.

War Of The Worlds" was only the second book by HG Wells that I've read - “The World Set Free” being the first. Of course I had some awareness of the contents thanks to the movie, but there was much, it turned out, that I didn't know about the book's story, or, indeed, how many nods to its contents the 2005 movie has. For some reason, I wasn't really aware that the original book was set in the UK. Not only that, it's set in places that I am familiar with. I have been to Horsell Common - where the first alien (Martian in the book's case) lands - and my grandparents used to live in Cobham, which also gets mentioned, and I have been to places such as Leatherhead, Woking, and Epping that also get mentioned. I really enjoyed Wells' pithy insights about humanity. Such as, Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. and we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. and What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! and I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit. But there were times when some of the observations showed their age, such as Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. The future wars (at the time of writing), to some degree Wells himself foretold in “The World Set Free”, with the use of atomic bombs, for example, were perhaps equal to the what the Martians do in "War Of The Worlds". By chance I was listening to the Audiobook of the complete collection of Mark Twain on the same days as I was reading "War Of The Worlds". Usually I have no problem following more than two books at the same time - but this time there were some issues. Part of this stemmed from overlaps in the some rather archaic use of the English language (e.g. in "War Of The Worlds", sentences such as 'His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating' would probably be phrased differently these days). But, I had also no idea that Mark Twain had written science fiction and so some of the content, although the storylines were very different, had overlaps in terms of observations at times due to Twain and Wells seemingly having equally dismissive views on religion and humanity at times. One observation of Wells really resonated in terms of the way the world appears to be going with AI, but this may also stem from my influence of watching movies such as RoboCop, I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called PUNCH. He pointed out - writing in a foolish, facetious tone - that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, “ teacher and agent of the brain.” While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger. Of course, in the end, the Martians are defeated by not having built up natural resistance to bacteria that exists around us on Earth. Humans, on the other hand, have. The following words feel quite chilling after the recent COVID-19 pandemic, by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many - those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance - our living frames are altogether immune. But as chilling as that may sound, nothing is more significant in "War Of The Worlds" than the following sentence, we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. Overall, I found "War Of The Worlds" and really good read. It's great that it's available for free as an eBook, but I think I will get a printed copy one day so that I can go through it more carefully again. I still prefer printed copies over eBooks when I want to fully engage with a text. I just wish that I had read this book when I was much younger as I think I could have benefitted from its insights over the years. I would also like to learn more about HG Wells and hope that The Rest Is History podcast one day features him.

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