#24. THE TIME MACHINE & THE WAR OF THE WORLDS By H G Wells

Published : 1895 & 1898
Pages : 274
Overall Mark : 7/10

Well's two masterpieces are still the definitive treatments of the themese of time travel and alien invasion. In The Time Machine, Well's Time Traveller journeys to the world of 802,701 AD, where humanity has divided into the effete, beautiful Eloi and the brutal subterranean Morlocks. In The War Of The Worlds, the Martians - intellects 'vast and cool and unsympathetic' - send their war machines to wreak havoc across the world.

H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)
The son of a shopkeeper, Wells began to publish fiction in the 1890s. The Time Machine, published in 1895, heralded an extraordinary period of 6 years in which he published almost all the 'scientific romances' which made his fame. An early member of the Fabian Society (from which developed the Labour Party), he was for the last four decades of his life a world-famous writer and thinker.

VERDICT
In spite of being well ahead of their time, and paving the way for all science fiction literature in the years following, these stories aren't that impressively written and can at times get a little repetitive and boring. Despite this weakness Wells does still manage to drag out what could otherwise be a few pages of scenery into an entire novella and comes up with some ingenious visuals.