"The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells

Told from a first-person narrative perspective many years after the events of the novel, "The War of the Worlds" is the story of an attempted invasion of Earth at the end of the nineteenth century by intelligent and merciless creatures from Mars. The narrator is a middle-class author living in the outer suburbs of London with his wife when one night a flash of green light is seen in the sky and a strange glowing cylinder crashes into the Horsell common, a few miles from the narrator's home. In the weeks before the landing, astronomers of Earth had witnessed several giant plumes of smoke on the Martian surface that the narrator explains as being the discharge from a giant cannon used to launch the invaders across interplanetary space. A crowd gathers around the cylinder, which eventually opens and from it emerges several Martians. The martians have large heads with huge eyes and an array of tentacles and are seen to have trouble moving around under the influence of the Earth's larger gravity. When a party of humans approaches the cylinder bearing a white flag of peace, the Martians incinerate them and the surrounding bystanders using a "heat-ray"; the narrator bears witness to the scene but escapes by chance of being out of the path of the Martian's fire. Fearing that the area might turn into a warzone, the narrator borrows a horse and cart and evacuates his wife to family in Leatherhead before returning to his home. The British army is called in to control the area, and newspapers spread a story of the Martians that convinces the population of their own safety; the Martians are thought to be foolish and so burdened by their physical limitations that they will quickly be overwhelmed. When several more cylinders land and the Martians build huge mechanical "fighting-machines", fast-moving tripods equipped with heat-rays and chemical weapons, the public's illusion of safety is shattered and the Martians quickly advance across the countryside towards London, bringing panic and near-total destruction to everything in their path. The narrator's account includes several chapters that follow his brother's flight from London amidst the chaos to the east coast, where he escapes across the English channel to Ostend.

The narrator seeks refuge in an empty house accompanied by a Curate of a local village he passes through, hiding from the black chemical smoke used by the Martians for exterminating hidden pockets of Earthlings. While they hide out, a cylinder crash lands in the vicinity burying half the house under rubble and leaving the pair trapped with the only exit being directly over the pit left by the cylinder which is used as a sort of encampment by the Martians. After days of hiding and watching the Martians go about their daily business, the Curate slowly looses touch with reality and begins the ramble and shout, believing the Martians to be a punishment to mankind sent by god. The narrator is forced to knock the Curate unconscious fearing his behaviour will betray their presence to the Martians in the pit and when a Martian sentry examines the ruins of the house, the Curate is dragged away and the narrator escapes by hiding within a pantry. After more than a week of waiting the narrator is eventually forced to leave his place of hiding to search for food and water; luckily the Martians have abandoned the pit and the narrator escapes. The narrator wanders aimlessly across the deserted outer suburbs of London which are full of burnt houses, dead bodies and a curious red weed which has overgrown across the landscape. He eventually encounters a surviving artilleryman of a wiped-out army unit that he had previously encountered at his house during the second day of the invasion. The artilleryman dreams of rebuilding human civilisation underground and tries to convince the narrator to be a part of his new world, but sensing a lack of the artilleryman's intent for actually putting in the work to carry out the plan, the narrator leaves and heads for central London. In London, the narrator discovers the dead bodies and broken machines of the Martians; after weeks on Earth their bodies have succumbed to bacteria and other microorganisms that they had evolved no defence against on their home planet. Weeks later human civilisation is still in the process of rebuilding and the narrator returns to his home where he is reunited with his wife, who like him was miraculously able to survive during the invasion.

In the novel Wells has made an insightful challenge to the assumed superiority of Europeans and the colonialism of the British empire at the time the novel was written. The story turns the notion of imperialistic conquer on it's head from the perspective of Victorian-era English readers; the english (and the human race at large) are now the "Native Tasmanians" and "Dodos" according to Wells's own analogy. The book is an early example of "invasion literature" and has had a huge influence on science fiction in the century since, setting the ground work for themes of alien invasion and technological warfare that have been widely used in contemporary science fiction. Separate from it's science fiction merits, it's a nice horror story (genuinely frightening in parts) and a study of human reactions to fear and disaster. I'd take a guess that this is probably a big part of it's long-lasting appeal. I really liked the use of characters the narrator meets (i.e. the Curate and the Artilleryman) as focal points for themes in the novel. Through his interactions with the Curate, Wells contrasts what was probably his own realist perspective against the irrationality of the Curate, the shattering of his assumed privilege of mankind over beasts and his hope for divine deliverance. The Artilleryman is an interesting figure; through him we are shown a potential future, a logical extension of the eventual path of a conquered human race, but then the Artilleryman is discredited as idealistic, full of talk but no action, an orthogonal contrast to the Curate.

It's interesting to see a lot of talk being bandied about on other internet reviews of the book (and associated Spielberg film from 2005) that the ending of the novel is a "deus ex machina"; I totally disagree. The Martians needed to be defeated by the end of the novel, otherwise the narrator would not be alive to give his account and an ending in which human ingenuity was responsible in anyway for the Martian's downfall would totally go against the central idea of challenging our own superiority. I really think the ending was great; the irony that their defeat was brought about by lifeforms that are to "man with a microscope" as we are to the Martians and the subtle warning that the hubris of the colonialism of humans could meet with a similar disaster.

Overall, a must-read, both because of it's classic status and that it's still a really enjoyable story, the appeal of which I'd say has not faded.

"Air" by Geoff Ryman

Chung Mae lives in the small, isolated village of Kizuldah within the fictional central-Asian country of Karzistan and is the village's fashion expert. She gives advice on makeup to the other women in the village and designs "best dresses" for the high school graduation ceremony. Her husband Joe owns a small block of land and a rice terrace, which feeds them and her husband's brother and father who live in the loft of their small house. Kizuldah is the last village on Earth to connect to the internet when Wing and his wife Kwan, some of the more "wealthy" village residents, buy an internet "TV". The year is 2020. A number of days later, the government runs it's first test of the new communications technology "Air", meant to connect every mind on the planet without the need for any hardware or consent. When the test begins, Mae and her neighbour Granny Tung are left dazed and confused by the strange sensations Air imposes on them, and Granny Tung is killed when she falls onto a brazen of boiling water in Mae's kitchen. While trying to help Mrs. Tung, Mae accidentally engages a "software bug" in Air that copies Mrs. Tung's dying conscience into her head and is left with a permanent connection to Air that she can employ even after the test is over. Besides the trauma caused to Mae's village and a small minority of others around the world who were not properly prepared, the test is considered a success, and Air is scheduled to be switched on permanently in one year's time. Mae realises that her village is not ready for Air, and starts out on a quest of knowledge to prepare herself and her village.

Mrs. Tung's presence influences Mae's behaviour; after a fight over the village strongman attempting to bamboozle her husband Joe of their land, Mae starts an affair with her neighbour Mr. Ken, Mrs. Tung's grandson, and falls pregnant. Mae is compelled to learn how the use the internet TV of her friend Kwan and connect her fashion business to the wider world. She teaches the people of the village how to use the TV, bringing the objections of the more conservative village members. She receives a grant to create a fashion business which exports local handcrafts to first-world buyers using the internet. Mae's connection to Air allows her to see the past, present and future, from which she sees a vision of a flood that will wipe away the village. The combination of her exposed affair, her continual warnings to the other villagers and the regular violent outbursts that occur when Mrs. Tung's presence comes to the surface results in Mae being ostracised, feared and concerned for by her neighbours and friends. Mae travels to the city with the support of her friends Sunni, Kwan and Sezen and is invited to visit "Green Valley Systems" by company head Mr. Tunch, who is interested in the curious circumstances surrounding Mae's connecting to Air and Granny Tung. Mae learns about the different proposed "formats" for Air, the larger struggle for format dominance, and how corporations like Mr. Tunch's want control of the format for their own power. Mae is held at Green Valley Systems against her will but eventually escapes with the aid of an experimental talking dog.

Back in Kizuldah, Mae patches up her relationships with her family. Eventually Mae's vision comes true and she leads the effort to rescue the people of the village when the flood comes in the early hours of Chinese new year's day. Gaining the respect and attention of her peers, when Air does finally come, her village is ready. She gives birth to her child into a brave new world and optimistically reflects on what the future holds.

Air is a fantastic story about the traditional ways of life confronted by the changing world and forced to adapt to survive. Ryman celebrates and criticises both the old way and new way of life such that the overall balance is somewhat neutral, a mix; the future is coming whether the residents of Kizuldah like it or not. The story is always told through the eyes of Chung Mae; we learnt about Air given Chung Mae's background and perspective, not our own, emphasising the strangeness of the modern world, it's bizarre terminology and it's distance from the life of Kizuldah. Mae is an interesting and multi-facetted protagonist; she is smart, caring and driven while also being erratic, vulnerable. It was a good choice to have a character like Mrs. Tung take up residence in Mae's mind; her memories and personality traits that are imprinted on Mae give the reader a rich perspective on the traditional way of life that celebrates its love and loss. Generally speaking the novel is full of very interesting characters, particularly the female ones, and vivid detail of the life of the village, it's poverty, festivals, social politics, working life. Although I thought Mae was a really well painted central character, I did have a bit of trouble at times trying to understand her motivations and what/why she was doing at some points. It also seemed odd that given the sacred nature of the history of the Eloi people to Kwan, she didn't object to Mae's business ideas for selling Eloi handcrafts. Was there some aspect of cultural appropriation worth exploring here, or perhaps that would be going too off-track from the central themes of the novel? Also, as raised in countless other reviews of the book, the abdominal pregnancy thing was a little bit weird; I was just never sure of what was the point of this; the symbolism was a bit lost on me (I mean I think a normal and more believable pregnancy would have got the job done all the same).

Overall, a really great book with lots of depth; definitely worth reading.