The War of the Worlds: Classics Illustrated #124
48
The War of the Worlds: Classics Illustrated #124
48eBook
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Overview
The War of the Worlds is a timeless science fiction novel by H.G. Wells. Taking place in London, it covers the fears, escape plans and struggles for the reunion of families amidst an alien invasion from Mars. An inspiration to artists of every sort from radio to literature to film.
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From its beginnings in the 1940’s to today, Classics Illustrated continues to encourage a love of reading and adventure in youthful minds through beautifully-illustrated comic book adaptations of the world’s most beloved stories by the world’s greatest authors.
A collection of Classics Illustrated books is an inviting start to any young person’s library.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620280812 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | First Classics |
| Publication date: | 07/11/2013 |
| Series: | Classics Illustrated , #124 |
| Sold by: | De Marque |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 48 |
| Sales rank: | 991,059 |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 9 - 14 Years |
About the Author
Alfonso Ruiz was born in 1975 in Macuspana, Tabasco in Mexico, where the temperature is just as hot as the sauce is. He became a comic book illustrator when he was 17 years old, and has worked on many graphic novels since then. Alfonso has illustrated several English graphic novels, including retellings of Dracula and Pinocchio.
Davis Worth Miller and Katherine McLean Brevard are a married couple living and working together in North Carolina. They are both full-time writers. Miller has written several best-selling books including The Tao of Muhammad Ali. He is now working on his memoir and several other novels with his wife.
Davis Worth Miller and Katherine McLean Brevar are a married couple living and working together in North Carolina. They are both full-time writers. Miller has written several best-selling books including The Tao of Muhammad Ali. He is now working on his memoir and several other novels with his wife.
Date of Birth:
September 21, 1866Date of Death:
August 13, 1946Place of Birth:
Bromley, Kent, EnglandPlace of Death:
London, EnglandEducation:
Normal School of Science, London, EnglandRead an Excerpt
The War of the Worlds
By H. G. Wells Franklin Watts
Copyright © 2006 H. G. Wells
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780531169636
Chapter One
The Eve of the War
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the greatdisillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
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. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from life's beginning but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbor. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and gray with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly 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. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety -- their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours -- and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet -- it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war -- but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
Continues...
Excerpted from The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells Copyright © 2006 by H. G. Wells. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Reading Group Guide
1. In 1878 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli used the most advanced telescope of his day to map the surface of Mars. He discovered a number of dark, thin lines crisscrossing the planet and assumed that they were water channels'in Italian, canali. This was mistranslated into English as canals; as a result of this subtle linguistic error, many people in Britain and America believed these passages were man-made. It was in such an atmosphere of misunderstanding and scientific speculation that Wells published The War of the Worlds. Today, however, we know a great deal about Mars and the possibility of life there. Does our scientific knowledge of what is on Mars make the novel any less alarming? Why or why not?
2. Isaac Asimov has argued that The War of the Worlds can be read as an argument against British colonialism and the cold expansion of the empire. 'H. G. Wells must have wanted to write his book in such a way as to demonstrate the evils of [colonialism], ' Asimov writes. 'He must have tried to show his own countrymen what they were doing to the world. The British had been in the forefront of the imperialistic drive, and by the end of the 1800's, the British Empire included a quarter of the land area and the population of the world. . . . It seemed only poetic justice then that the Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds fell upon the British.' Do you agree with Asimov's reading?
3. Wells begins the book with the chilling image of alien life watching over the earth. He describes the Martians as planning their attacks on an unsuspecting man with 'intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.' How does this image resonate today?
4. Shortly beforeWells died in 1946, he said, 'Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me.' What does Wells mean by this?
5. When the Martians first land on earth, the people who encounter them initially treat the incident lightly, as if the aliens are a traveling amusement. Is this a realistic response? What do you think Wells is trying to say by this?
6. How does Wells use language and narrative style to create suspense and a sense of terror? Is the book frightening?
7. Many people consider The War of the Worlds the greatest science fiction book of all time. Do you agree? Why or why not? What other books are among the best? What defines a classic of science fiction?