|
Many critics compare Wells with Jules Verne,but while Verne refers his fictions to real scientific facts, Wells concentrates more on political and social future visions.Verne said about Wells that his stories didn't rensponse on very scientific bases;Wells invented,but he was nevertheless aware of the latest thought in science.
Wells reason to write fantasy fiction was to make money and to get on.He successfully did,thanks of the large appetite for the spine-chiller,the bizarre,the weird,and the apocalyptic amog nineteenth-century-readers.The public had heard with astonishment of the new inventions such as the electric light bulb or Benz`s motorcars and to make oneself invisible,for instance, seemed no more or less possible than wireless comunication.
The concrete fictions in The Time Machine are as true as the fictions in Vernes's Book Travel to the Moon refering to the later cognizances of Albert Einstein which bowled over the earlier scientific "truth":Noone before Einstein knew that "travelling" trough the dimension time is only possible
by moving with light-speed.Einstein's gravitation-theory denies that a capsle could be shot to the moon
just by the power of a big canoon,as it hapenes in Travel to the Moon,but this could know noone before too.
Concerning the evolution Wells writes of the have and have-nots,observing that instead of the "great triumph of Humanity I (the Time Traveller) had dreamed of," the "splitting of our of our species along lines of social satisfaction" had become complete and the "exchange between class and class" that had kept society on a more or less even keel had long ago ended.
The Darwinian evolution theory,in the time of gen-technology by which we could influence the evolution completely,is today as actual as before.
The War of the Worlds:This book is partly simillar to another book of H.G.Wells,The Invisible Man, published one year before The War of the Worlds.In the former the Martians devaste and terrorize the whole country,inluding it's citty,London and in the latter a man terrorizes a country too: "That invisible man must now establish a Reign of Terror.He must take a town,like your Burdock,...And all who disobey his orders he must kill and kill all who would defend them"
But The Invisible Man lacks of poetry and multiplication of meanings in comparision to the two other mentioned books of Wells.An example for the different meanings in The War of the Worlds is the part where the artilleryman-or Wells himself-gives his opinion concerning the evolution-theory of Charles Darwin:"Cities,nations,civilizations,progress-it`s all over.That game's up.We're beat."They had to fight the Martians,and there had to be underground resistance,he tells on.Wells published this part of the book only later in the hardback-edition,because he went on to say by the artilleryman:"the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die....It's a sort of disloyality,after all,to live and taint the race."
|
