Monday, April 09, 2007

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Somehow up to now I skipped reading this book. It is such a classic! I had heard so much about it from here and there and different classes but hadn't ever read it. Then the movie came out recently with Tom Cruise...well it didn't do justice to the book. HG Wells wrote three really good science-fiction books. All classics and all have parallel purposes...or in better words, "Wells was famous for his thinly-veiled diatribes."
The book is actually about the present. "It simply uses different techniques to show us who we are, who we might be and whom we ought to become." -Orson Scott Card

Take Africa for example...England was a super power. It couldn't invade Africa until it come up with a way to not catch all the plagues and disease there. The African people had build up immunities to things like Malaria, the people from England hadn't yet. This book talks about this but in Fiction terms and never mentions Africa.

I realy hated this book but I really liked it too. I am never for scary but this was just old fasioned enough I could get through it and still keep my head from hiding under the covers and teeth chattering. I did have nightmares but not like I did from Alas Babylon. Yikes.

So Martians invade the Earth, they slaughter people in England and the narrator of the story sees most first hand and lives to tell about it. He describes each day in detail after the invasion. He really makes us take a good hard look at society in general...and how stupid we are to forget nature and how little we are really in the big picture of life in this universe.

I think this would be a fun book for a book discussion because there are so many ideas that really make you think. What would I do if I was in the same situation? Well I hope I wouldn't rubber neck at an unknown object that fell from space and then just get killed.

Healing Book?

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