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The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds (Everyman's Library Classics Series)
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About The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War Of The
Product Description Gathered together in one hardcover volume: three timeless novels from the founding father of science fiction. The first great novel to imagine time travel, The Time Machine (1895) follows its scientist narrator on an incredible journey that takes him finally to Earth’s last moments—and perhaps his own. The scientist who discovers how to transform himself in The Invisible Man (1897) will also discover, too late, that he has become unmoored from society and from his own sanity. The War of the Worlds (1898)—the seminal masterpiece of alien invasion adapted by Orson Welles for his notorious 1938 radio drama, and subsequently by several filmmakers—imagines a fierce race of Martians who devastate Earth and feed on their human victims while their voracious vegetation, the red weed, spreads over the ruined planet. Here are three classic science fiction novels that, more than a century after their original publication, show no sign of losing their grip on readers’ imaginations. About the Author H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a prolific English writer in many genres, prominent in his time as a socialist and a pacifist as well as a pioneer of science fiction. Margaret Drabble is the award-winning author of seventeen novels, including The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, The Witch of Exmoor, and The Needle’s Eye. She has written several biographies and works of nonfiction and edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She lives in London and Somerset. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From the Introduction by Margaret Drabble H. G. Wells was an astonishingly versatile and prolific writer. He did not invent science fiction single-handed but he had an overwhelmingly powerful influence on the development of the genre, and produced some of its classic early examples. Generations of novelists have born witness and paid homage to him, from Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss and Doris Lessing to younger practitioners such as China Miéville and Greg Bear. George Orwell, who was to create perhaps the most famous dystopia of all, claimed in 1941, four years before Wells died, that 'the minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.'* The plots and themes of Wells live on in innumerable screen versions, reminding us that the legendary radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds in 1938 by a young Orson Welles nearly brought New Jersey to a panic-stricken halt. This was the first alien invasion, and it continues to spawn imitations. The world of academe has been uneasy about Wells's literary status, and it is interesting to note that his French predecessor and rival Jules Verne (1828-1905), who confined himself more exclusively to the scientific romance and the adventure story, enjoys a more secure position in the French canon than Wells does in ours, and remains the darling of intellectuals and the French avant-garde. The English like Verne, but they do not revere him or take him seriously. Wells today has eloquent and scholarly champions, but is reputation rests on his popular appeal, which has not diminished. He was in his day a great popularizer, and professed to despise the high and polished art of his contemporary Henry James (1843-1916). Three of his most celebrated stories appear in this volume, all written when he was a young man and long before the label 'science fiction' was coined, but the subject of space travel and speculations about the evolutionary future of the human race obsessed him all his life, finding a final expression in his last work, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), which (like his first novella in 1895) foresaw the annihilation of our species. He peered into the future, and he did not always like what he saw. He used the form of fiction for satiric, political and prophetic purposes, writing from a temperament that shifted, at times violently, between social optimism and dystopian despair. T
