The War of the WorldsThe War of the Worlds--observe through telescopes the spectacle of the collision of the comet and the moon and prepare scientific articles on what they consider to be the minor damage to the land. Wells's narrator then carefully reverses the homocentric pretensions: "Which only shows how small the greatest human catastrophes can seem, at a distance of a few million miles. » Wells's perspectives on the contingency of civilization are not always extraterrestrial. Until the end of his life, Wells himself considered scientific novels inconsequential. So did the critical establishment until Bernard Bergonzi, in his 1961 study The Early HG Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, brilliantly argued that these works deserved to be classified as classics of the English language. SYNOPSIS: [Verne is recognized as one of the world's first and most imaginative writers of modern science fiction. His works reflect 19th-century concerns about contemporary scientific innovation and its potential for benefit or destruction for humanity. In the following excerpt from an interview with Gordon Jones, he praises the imaginative creativity with which Wells constructs his scientific fantasies and highlights the difference between Wells' style and his own.]. In The War of the Worlds, once again, a work for which I confess to having great admiration, we are left completely in the dark as to what kind of creatures the Martians really are, or how they produce the marvelous ray of heat with which they wreak such terrible havoc on their attackers. [In saying this] I am not disparaging Mr. Wells' methods; on the contrary, I have the greatest respect for his imaginative genius. I'm just in the middle of a paper......erne at Home, in an interview with Gordon Jones, "in Temple Bar, Vol. CXXIX, No. 523, June 1904, pp. 664 -71.SOURCE5: Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, in her Collected Essays, Vol II, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967, pp. 103-10. SOURCE6: Christopher Isherwood, “HG Wells”, in his Exhumations: Stories, Articles, Verses, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1966, pp. 38-46. SOURCE7: W. Somerset Maugham, “Some Novelists I Have Known,” in his The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays, Doubleday, 1953, pp. 50. Michael Draper, “HG Wells,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 34: British Novelists, 1890-1929, edited by Thomas F. Staley, Gale Research Inc., 1985, pp. 292-315. SOURCE9: DISCovering Authors, Gale Research Inc., 1996. SOURCE10: Mark R. Hillegas, in his The Future as Nightmare: HG Wells and the Anti-Utopians, Oxford University Press, 1967, 200 p...