the war of the worlds herbert george wells

The end result is not just a science fiction masterpiece but one of the fiercest anti-imperialist polemics ever written. “Wells carefully juxtaposed detailed realism of Victorian suburbia with the fantastic visitation of the Martians in order to emphasise how terrible and strange the experience would have been,” says historian Peter Beck who has worked closely on the Wells in Woking project. It was a specific recipe: comfortable familiarity set against an alien horror. He noted the landscape in detail: the sandpits on the common, its squatters’ camps, the canal, public houses and rail lines and recalled in his autobiography that he “wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians”. In the afternoons Wells worked on his books but took morning trips – on new-fangled safety bicycles that were then becoming popular – to Horsell Common on the outskirts of town before cycling over Ottershaw bridge and into the neighbouring towns of Chobham and Send.

Their little house in Maybury Road is pebble-dashed today and part of a long line of semis that face the main railway line to London – though at the time it was relatively isolated. Wells went to live in Woking with his new partner, Catherine Robbins, in 1895 in order to avoid the polluted air of London.

For good measure he was also a passionate defender of human rights,” said James, whose most recent book Maps of Utopia (OUP) follows Wells’ 60-year writing career. His novels The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds were the first true science fiction novels in the English language. “The anniversary of his birthday is every bit as important as that of Shakespeare. “Wells was a visionary – he wrote about the atom bomb, tank, airplane and the internet long before they were invented – and he was also a really powerful writer, one of our finest novelists,” said English scholar Professor Simon James of Durham University. A major conference on his works will also be held in July, while in a few weeks the Wells in Woking Trail will be opened to allow visitors to track how the Martians took over Surrey. Woking’s celebrations will form part of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Wells, a national occasion that has already seen the London restaging of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds and TV screenings of several of his stories (with Ray Winstone playing Wells).

The war of the worlds herbert george wells