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The War in the Air

H. G. Wells

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The War in the Air | H. G. Wells

The War in the Air

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War in the Air was written during a prolific time in H. G. Wells's writing career. Having withdrawn from British politics to spend more time on his own ideas, while many British citizens were surprised by the advent of World War I, Wells had already written prophetically about such a conflict. War in the Air predicted use of airplanes in modern war.
It was a black spot moving slowly with him far below, following him down there, indefatigably, over the cloud mountains. Why should such a thing follow him? What could it be?...

He had an inspiration. "Uv course!" he said. It was the shadow of the balloon. But he still watched it dubiously for a time.

He returned to the plans on the table.

He spent a long afternoon between his struggles to understand them and fits of meditation. He evolved a remarkable new sentence in French.

"Voici, Mossoo!—Je suis un inventeur Anglais. Mon nom est Butteridge. Beh. oo. teh. teh. eh. arr. I. deh. geh. eh. J'avais ici pour vendre le secret de le flying-machine. Comprenez? Vendre pour l'argent tout suite, l'argent en main. Comprenez? C'est le machine a jouer dans l'air. Comprenez? C'est le machine a faire l'oiseau. Comprenez? Balancer? Oui, exactement! Battir l'oiseau en fait, a son propre jeu. Je desire de vendre ceci a votre government national. Voulez vous me directer la?

"Bit rummy, I expect, from the point of view of grammar," said Bert, "but they ought to get the hang of it all right.

"But then, if they arst me to explain the blessed thing?"

He returned in a worried way to the plans. "I don't believe it's all here!" he said....

He got more and more perplexed up there among the clouds as to what he should do with this wonderful find of his. At any moment, so far as he knew he might descend among he knew not what foreign people.

"It's the chance of my life!" he said.

It became more and more manifest to him that it wasn't. "Directly I come down they'll telegraph—put it in the papers. Butteridge'll know of it and come along—on my track."

Butteridge would be a terrible person to be on any one's track. Bert thought of the great black moustaches, the triangular nose, the searching bellow and the glare. His afternoon's dream of a marvellous seizure and sale of the great B

Jon 12/09/2021
So reading this book is a tentative start at going through some of Wells' vast catalog beyond the "Big Three" that pretty much everybody has read: The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds. I selected this one more or less at random. It is a work of speculative fiction involving
Artie 12/06/2020
The first H.G. Wells book I've read. I'm not sure why it's not as famous as the others. It is a bit uneven but the good parts are very very good, and its message about technology advancing faster than morality is always timely.
B. 09/06/2016
In many ways this is quite prescient, aircraft did radically change war.
My only real complaint is the prediction of the fall of the modern scientific society, so many things he thinks would have been lost (weaving fabrics, good farming practices, stuff like that) would not have been lost - Hades man
J.G. Keely 04/06/2015
A remarkably progressive book, but then Wells did like his politics. His constant observation that Europeans are no more civilized than the other races of man, and no less prone to violent, dominant, cruel behavior is refreshing amongst the variety of Victorian sci fi and adventure stories I've been
Sandy 08/22/2011
"The War of the Worlds" wasn't the only masterpiece that H.G. Wells wrote with the words "The War" in the title. "The War in the Air," which came out 10 years later, in 1908, is surely a lesser-known title by this great author, but most certainly, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece nonetheless. In

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