War of the Worlds
By H. G. Wells

Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1897 and it has become so embedded in our culture that I would expect almost everyone to know the story. How many have read the original though? Most will know it primarily through its film, TV and radio adaptations; a shame because the novel is not only short but a very exciting read.

Some consider Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the first "science-fiction" novel but to most, Wells' The Time Machine has that honour. At the time, Wells was considered to be writing something called a Scientific Romance but his early books are close to or identical to the modern genre. They really were something new and special.

Under two hundred pages, the book is fast paced and exciting. It introduces many elements and ideas that would go on to have a long life over the course of the Twentieth Century, including technology we can recognise today (even if we are far from its implementation). Technology like : the "black" poison gas the Martians use, the "heat ray" that burns and destroys everything it passes over, a flying machine :

"I believe they've built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly"
I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.
"Fly!"
"Yes," he said, "fly."
I went on into a little bower, and sat down.
"It is all over for humanity," I said. "If they can do that they will simply go around the world."
He nodded.

What is left for humanity? This book will have shocked and terrorised readers back then as the relentless march of these unstoppable mechanical monsters approaches the capital. Wells does not stint on the horror or shock. I felt the power even today.

And so, from 1897 on into the Twentieth Century, and in a few years the cataclysm for Europe. Europe doesn't need Martians for wholesale destruction with war machines and poison gas. My teenage self would have loved reading this and it would probably instill or fortify a love for books if read at school. A brilliant novel.