'Get a good one,' advises Aunt Charlotte 'one that will last.' You do-and it does last. Think of all the advantages of a cheap possession-cheap and nasty, if you will-compared with some valuable substitute. While his most popular works tend to show a bleak future for humanity, he was not without his sardonic wit and wry humour Part prophet, part pessimist, Wells was a prolific author not just of science fiction but also fiction and non, utopian and dystopian short stories, travel sketches, histories, and socio-political commentary. The popular novel foreshadowed things to come for the human race: robotics, World Wars, warfare tactics including aerial bombing, use of tanks and chemical weapons, and nuclear power. Wells' masterpiece spawned more invasion literature and inspired numerous movie adaptations and print sequels. Forty years after its publication, on the night of Halloween 1938, Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on-air radio broadcast of the novel caused widespread panic in New York City. Wells is often credited, along with Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) and Jules Verne (1828-1905) as being one of the fathers of science fiction. The invasion of earth by aliens from Mars, tripods attacking with Heat Rays and Black Smoke and the evacuation of London while people were terrorised in the surrounding countryside became one of the first internationally read modern science fiction stories. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.-Ch. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. Wells (1866-1946), English author, futurist, essayist, historian, socialist, and teacher wrote The War of the Worlds (1898)

Hg wells a short history of the world