The War Of The Worlds Essay Research

The War Of The Worlds Essay, Research Paper

The War of the Worlds–are observing through telescopes the spectacle of the collision of the comet and the moon and are preparing scientific papers on what they take to be the minor damage done to the earth. Wells’s narrator then neatly upends homocentrist pretensions: “Which only shows how small the vastest human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.”

Wells’s perspectives on the contingency of civilization are not always extraterrestrial.

To the end of his life, Wells himself regarded the scientific romances as inconsequential. So did the critical establishment until Bernard Bergonzi, in his 1961 study The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, argued to great effect that these works deserved to be ranked among the classics of the English language.

SYNOPSIS:

[Verne is acknowledged as one of the world's first and most imaginative modern science fiction writers. His works reflect nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary scientific innovation and its potential for human benefit or destruction. In the following excerpt from an interview with Gordon Jones, he commends the imaginative creativity with which Wells constructs his scientific fantasies and stresses the difference between Wells's style and his own.]

. In The War of the Worlds, again, a work for which I confess I have a great admiration, one is left entirely in the dark as to what kind of creatures the Martians really are, or in what manner they produce the wonderful heat ray with which they work such terrible havoc on their assailants.

[In saying this ], I am casting no disparagement on Mr. Wells’ methods; on the contrary, I have the highest respect for his imaginative genius. I am merely contrasting our two styles and pointing out the fundamental difference which exists between them, and I wish you clearly to understand that I express no opinion on the superiority of either the one or the other….

SYNOPSIS:

[Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. Like her contemporary James Joyce, with whom she is often compared, she employed the stream-of-consciousness technique in many of her fictional works. Her critical essays, which cover almost the entire range of English literature, contain some of her finest prose and are praised for their insight. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1919, Woolf charges Wells with materialism.]

ARTICLE:

[Wells] had no illusions about himself as an author. He always insisted that he made no pretension to be an artist. That was, indeed, something he despised rather than admired, and when he spoke of Henry James, an old friend, who claimed, as I have hinted, perhaps a little too often that he was an artist and nothing else, it was good-humouredly to ridicule him. “I’m not an author,” H. G. would say, “I’m a publicist. My work is just high-class journalism.” On one occasion, after he had been staying with me, he sent me a complete edition of his works and next time he came he saw them displayed in an imposing row on my shelves. They were well printed on good paper and handsomely bound in red. He ran his finger along them and with a cheerful grin said: “They’re as dead as mutton, you know. They all dealt with matters of topical interest and now that the matters aren’t topical any more they’re unreadable.” There is a good deal of truth in what he said. He had a fluent pen and too often it ran away with him. I have never seen any of his manuscripts, but I surmise that he wrote with facility and corrected little. He had a way of repeating in one sentence, but in other words, exactly what he said in the previous one. I suppose it was because he was so full of the idea he wanted to express that he was not satisfied to say it only once. It made him unnecessarily verbose.

H. G.’s theory of the short story was a sensible one. It enabled him to write a number that were very good and several that were masterly. His theory of the novel was different. His early novels, which he had written to earn a living, did not accord with it and he spoke of them slightingly. His notion was that the function of the novelist was to deal with the pressing problems of the day and to persuade the reader to adopt the views for the betterment of the world which he, H. G., held. He was fond of likening the novel to a woven tapestry of varied interest, and he would not accept my objection that after all a tapestry has unity. The artist who designed it has given it form, balance, coherence and arrangement. It is not a jumble of unrelated items.

His later novels, are, if not, as he said, unreadable, at least difficult to read with delight. You begin to read them with interest, but as you go on you find your interest dwindle and it is only by an effort of will that you continue to read. I think Tono Bungay is generally considered his best novel. It is written with his usual liveliness, though perhaps the style is better suited to a treatise than to a novel, and the characters are well presented. He has deliberately avoided the suspense which most novelists attempt to create and he tells you more or less early on what is going to happen. His theory of the novelist’s function allows him to digress abundantly, which, if you are interested in the characters and their beha