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Review Of H. G. Well's 'The War Of Worlds'

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“This isn't a war. It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.” this is a quote from the artilleryman a character in H.G. Well's The War of Worlds. Aired in 1897 it was originally a radio broadcast, but was converted to book form in 1898. The artilleryman explains the great difference in power between the martians and themselves. The book starts with the main character who is also the narrator, and isn't given any specific name. He meets up with Ogilvy an astronomer who shows the narrator that there are some strange flashing lights on mars, he dismisses this fact as volcanoes or asteroids hitting mars. He also doesn't name a few other important people; his wife who he drops off in the beginning, an artillery man who…show more content…
They escape and find themselves watching a martian machine picking up humans and putting them in a large basket, they hideout in a ditch till morning when they go looking in another house for supplies. Suddenly the house collapses around them and the narrator is knocked out. When the narrator finally awakes he is met with the curate trying to motion for him to be silent, he looks out and see's another martian tripod. The fifth cylinder landed on them! Still stuck under the crushed house the narrator watches the martians closely, he discovers they have a new spider like machine with five robotic legs, and that the martians themselves are just large heads with tentacles that suck out blood. They watch the martians eat some humans and unsuccessfully try to escape. As food dwindles the narrator believes that they should begin to ration the last of It, but the curate wants no part of it and they argue. The arguing leads to the narrator knocking out the curate, when suddenly a martian reaches into the house with a large tentacle and grabs the curate out of the house, not to be seen again. Several days pass and he hears a dog barking outside his shelter, he realizes that the martians would have killed the dog, so it's probably safe to come out. He returns to the outside world and can not believe his…show more content…
Wells book ended well, the martians simply dying from bacteria was boring and didn't hold much for the victory of the human race. With the theme of the entire world at war, the reader needed a more satisfying ending, the human race victorious. Either that or the Narrator dying on his suicide mission and closing the book there. The books ending makes humans look closer at the world around them, and shows just how powerless and how everything is in gods hands. Overall not a bad
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