I want to talk about the founder of modern fiction. About a man who wrote novels that were repeatedly screened, put, reworked, transcribed. About a man who discovered several plot-forming genre-forming moves in the world literature.
Prior to him they wrote about fantastic travels, fantastic worlds and aliens from them, after him they wrote, but what Herbert George Wells did is incomprehensible. He really did some important, polemical things for world literature. And after this dam was already opened, a huge stream of works rushed, and magnificent, and high-quality, and second-rate, but Wells remains inimitable, he is completely ahead of all.
Here are three, in my opinion, his main things: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds. You can, of course, remember "The Invisible Man", "The Food of the Gods". These are very interesting novels, but these three are central, because they open up the theme of time, the theme of man and his life, the theme of the stranger, the theme of who is far from us. Will they come to us in peace, with the war, will they come to us in any way understandable to us, otherwise the "Fiasco" of Stanislaw Lem will come out, who very carefully read Wales and all modern science fiction writers carefully read Wells.
Wells is unusually realistic, you read his books in awe, although it's been 100 years. Here a few years ago the last screen version of The War of the Worlds was released, and everything looks very fresh, a little plot corrected and we are already getting an absolutely stunning story, one in one Wells. He so precisely focused his attention on the eternal human fears, this incomprehensible life, differently arranged ... remember in fact that the Martians are asexual, they will rejuvenate and one newborn Martian in the process of budding died when they all died from human viruses.
I do not agree with one of the annotations that I read, which says that this book is about the victory of mankind, that not the viruses and bacteria that the mighty newcomers have despised, killed them, but mankind is rallying, etc. Wells wrote, in principle, a really disastrous book and in general, humanity lost there and lost completely clearly, thoroughly and could be destroyed cleanly. If you remember, the Martians in the literal sense used as food people.
And this is completely natural - eating the strongest weakest, but only in nature. Where there is introduced into the equation a new unknown - the mind, there such relationships should no longer exist. And this thought is puzzled by the ridiculous death of the invaders, the danger that even people have already learned to win.
By the time of writing The War of the Worlds, as far as I understand, the first penicillin medicines were already invented, everything developed and the medicine was completely different from that in the 19th century and one could even say that a person is starting to conquer this danger. And here such here.
And why? Because in fact, the Martians, as if retreating a step back, from a philosophical point of view. They behaved like representatives of biology, and evolution, it not only does not know pity, it is generally outside these concepts, it is generally outside the categories of human consciousness and reason. And of course she instantly made her next move, which no grandmaster could foresee.
That's the way it seems to me to understand the "War of the Worlds" today.
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