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Bert Smallways, a cheerful, ignorant young bicycle mechanic from a London suburb, comes by accident into possession of the secret plans of a new flying…
Bert Smallways, a cheerful, ignorant young bicycle mechanic from a London suburb, comes by accident into possession of the secret plans of a new flying machine and is carried off in a runaway balloon to Germany, just as a great German fleet of airships sets out to attack the United States. Bert, a small man in a vast war, witnesses the bombing of New York, the collapse of world finance and a global war in the air that destroys civilisation itself.
Context and significance
H. G. Wells published the novel in 1908, only five years after the Wright brothers' first flight, and it predicted the bombing of cities from the air and a world war in which no one wins. Read The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.