War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, The

Although they are valued for sheer narrative excitement and suspense in the tradition of Poe, and for astonishing prophecy and realistic fantasy as inventive as Verne's, the stories of H.G. Wells are emphatically and frighteningly underscored by his self-avowed intent to shatter "that serene confidence in the future which is the most abundant source of decadence." The Martians' descent in The War of the Worlds (1895), Wells' first book, also projected the consequences of self-indulgence through the flaccid future Children of Light who are horribly subsumed by Morlocks, their drudging, monstrously cruel counterparts. Wells thought the immediate collective madness of The War of the Worlds the best introduction to his works, and so it here precedes the glittering ironies of its futuristic companion. England's nineteenth-century smuggery may well have been assaulted, but this century, well on the way to Wells' worlds, may shudder too - simply by turning the pages of this book.