Time Machine / War of the Worlds

Informationen zum Autor H. G. Wells was born Herbert George in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometimes shopkeeper, his mother a former lady's maid. Although "Bertie" left school at fourteen to become a draper's apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher's salary. His other "scientific romances"— The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1896),  The Invisible Man  (1897),  The War of the Worlds  (1898),  The First Men in the Moon  (1901), and  The War in the Air  (1908)—won him the distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling  Outline of History  (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me." Klappentext H. G. Wells Scientific visionary. Social prophet. Master storyteller. Few novelists have captivated generations of readers like H. G. Wells. In enduring! electrifying detail! he takes us to dimensions of time and space that have haunted our dreams for centuries -- and shows us ourselves as we really are. The time machine In the heart of Victorian England! an inquisitve gentleman known only as the Time Traveler constructs an elaborate invention that hurtles him hundreds of thousands of years into the future. There he finds himself in the violent center of the ultimate conflict between beings of light and creatures of darkness. The war of the worlds Martians invade Great Britain! laying waste turn-of-the-century London. This tale of conquest by superior beings with superadvanced technology is so nightmarishly real that an adaptation by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater sent hundreds of impressionable radio listeners into panicked flight forty years after the story's original publication. Chapter 1   The time traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way – marking the points with a lean forefinger – as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.   ‘You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.’   ‘Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?’ said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.   ‘I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness  nil , has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.’   ‘That is all right,’ said the Psychologist.   ‘Nor, having only length, breadth and th...

Product details

• Authors: H G Wells, H. G. Wells, H.G. Wells, Herbert G. Wells
• Publisher: Del Rey
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.04.1986
• EAN: 9780449300435
• ISBN: 978-0-449-30043-5
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 175 mm x 19 mm
• Series: Fawcett Paperbacks
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy