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The War in the Air
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

The War in the Air Paperback - 2007

by H. G. Wells

This thrilling tale is H. G. Wells at his modernist, visionary best. In 1907, a naive Londoner named Bert Smallways finds himself an unwitting passenger on a fleet of German airships heading over the Atlantic to attack New York. What unfolds in characteristically Wellsian fashion is a clash of early flying machines that leaves Gotham in shambles and unleashes the terrible age of Total War. Uncannily relevant to our own era, The War in the Air remains a cornerstone of early science fiction.


Summary

This thrilling tale is H. G. Wells at his modernist, visionary best. In 1907, a naive Londoner named Bert Smallways finds himself an unwitting passenger on a fleet of German airships heading over the Atlantic to attack New York. What unfolds in characteristically Wellsian fashion is a clash of early flying machines that leaves Gotham in shambles and unleashes the terrible age of Total War. Uncannily relevant to our own era, The War in the Air remains a cornerstone of early science fiction.

From the publisher

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime 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 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."

Details

  • Title The War in the Air
  • Author H. G. Wells
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition New
  • Pages 296
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Group
  • Date June 26, 2007
  • ISBN 9780141441306 / 0141441305
  • Weight 0.54 lbs (0.24 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.8 x 5.08 x 0.7 in (19.81 x 12.90 x 1.78 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Library of Congress subjects War stories, Dystopias
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2002075250
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

About the author

H.G. Wells was a professional writer and journalist, who published more than a hundred books, including novels, histories, essays and programmes for world regeneration. Wells's prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction, but later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress. His controversial views on sexual equality and the shape of a truly developed nation remain directly relevant to our world today. He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'.

Jay Winter is Professor of History at Yale University. He was previously Reader in History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He is a specialist on the First World War, and one of the founders of the Historial de la grande guerre at Peronne, Somme, an international museum of the Great War.

Patrick Parrinder
has written on H.G. Wells, science fiction, James Joyce and the history of the English novel. Since 1986 he has been Professor of English at the University of Reading.

Andy Sawyer
is a Librarian at the University of Sheffield with a particular interest in science fiction.

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The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)

The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)

by Wells, H. G.

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The War in the Air
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The War in the Air

by Wells, H. G.

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The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)

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The War in the Air
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The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)
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The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)

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The War in the Air
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The War in the Air

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The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)
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The War in the Air (Penguin Classics)

by Wells, H. G

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