Pamphlets of Destiny

I gather that much has been made of this novel as a precursor to Siegel and Shuster's Superman, or this is at least the reason for my having heard of it. The Gladiator was published in 1930 and features a man who leaps tall buildings with a single bound and can lift rocks of several tons. His skin is impervious to bullets and his hair is described as so black that it seems almost blue. It's hard to miss the parallels with the star of Action Comics, and although the first issue didn't appear until 1938, Siegel and Shuster had been working on the character since at least 1933. Nevertheless, once we're past those parallels already listed, the association becomes tenuous. One early version of Superman had powers bestowed upon him during the experiments of an irresponsible scientist, much like Wylie's Hugo Danner, but the argument remains thin.

Of course, the notion of progress as something which must surely apply to the future of human evolution was very much a hot topic when The Gladiator was written, meaning it taps into a popular theme more than it originates, and those persons then most visibly - or at least memorably - obsessed with such themes included those writing for early science-fiction magazines such as Hugo Gernsback's Astounding Stories.

Strangely, The Gladiator gets off to a thoroughly putrid start very much in the spirit of the misanthropy found in the worst of Astounding. Our amateur scientist is an unappreciated genius married to an unpleasant nag of a wife. Family values are emphasised with the sort of toxic conservatism typical of young male writers who haven't had much life experience but nevertheless presume themselves above the common herd; and Abednego Danner, our crusading scientist, routinely drowns any kittens left over once he's done with his experiments because he's above mere sentiment. His experiments, as you may have guessed, are geared towards the creation of a superhuman. He succeeds, and so his son is born effectively invulnerable with inhuman strength.

Just as I'd begun to wish I'd picked something else to read, the superbaby becomes a child and the novel reveals itself to be something quite different to that which was seemingly promised in the first chapters.

From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realise that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority.

Our boy, you see, is afflicted with superhuman ability more than he is blessed, and this theme dominates so much as to dispel any similarity to those sunnier cartoon people who fight crime and right wrongs with a big, big smile. If The Gladiator foreshadowed anything in the world of comic books, it would have been Stan Lee mashing caped books up with romance comics to produce the angst-ridden superheroes of the sixties and beyond, but even there the parallels are superficial, traditional comic book superhero angst serving mainly to add depth and contrast to the three colour antics. Here the angst is probably nothing less than a measure of the gulf which exists between ideology and that to which it is applied, because the dreams of supermen can only ever be a distraction.

His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father: great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness, its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes, the relief of visible facts, the hope in rationalisation, the needs of skin, belly, and womb.

I'm therefore assuming that the wince-inducing Gernsback-isms of the first chapters are deliberate, ultimately serving as a refutation of the mania from which they were born, and it's probably no coincidence that our main character is named Hugo.

Reaching maturity, the aforementioned Hugo does his best to make his way in the world, but his physical superiority sabotages everything he does to the point of leaving him destitute, struggling to make a living at a carnival sideshow. He struggles at college, accidentally kills an opponent during a game of football, before finding himself drawn into the first world war - the ultimate refutation of meaning, ideals, and ideology.

The Gladiator delivers a deliberately contrarian opener before settling into an intense and genuinely gripping philosophical debate with more than just a flavour - as well as the literary flair - of H.G. Wells at his best, savoured with pulpier touches and moods that remind me of John Fante and Céline, of all people. So I'm not saying this is superior to the caped comics which followed, but that it's such a different animal as to render comparisons mostly pointless. It's not much less than a retort to pretty much every lie we told ourselves for the duration of the last century.

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.

Alec Nevala-Lee Astounding (2018)
In addition to being a biography of John W. Campbell, Nevala-Lee's account also serves as a potted history of Astounding magazine and the birth of modern science-fiction - all three being inextricably knotted together. Obviously Astounding wasn't the only digest, but once Gernsback had left the table, it was the one with the widest influence which gave us the greatest authors of the form, notably Asimov, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt and others.

As with Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Campbell's impetus was futurism and invention at least as much or arguably more so than it was literary. He was an ideas man more than a writer, and so as editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, he farmed his ideas out to those he trusted to do a better job, usually preferring to focus on columns and editorials covering technological advances and innovations of the day and what he hoped would come next. Science-fiction was still burning off the energy of the nineteenth century discovery of progress as something which might be observed within a single human lifespan and the idea that we might actively direct where it was headed. Evolutionary theory had inevitably inspired the notion of supermen, and Campbell and Hubbard in particular were keen to lead the way in this respect.

The success of Astounding and of its greatest writers probably accounts for why science-fiction has become synonymous with film and television more so than with the written word, which is a shame in my view, but was most likely inevitable. More surprising is just how much of Astounding has extended itself into the present, notably the first science-fiction fan clubs of the thirties and forties foreshadowing the worst aspects of today's social media, and of course Hubbard's pseudo-religion which might arguably serve as a metaphor for much of the wider capitalist society it inhabits - which is depressing given that the Dianetics from which it was born didn't seem entirely without merit.

Anyway, as you may be aware, Campbell seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character, and Nevala-Lee does an exceptional job of balancing the myth against the reality, unflinching in describing the man's worst qualities without presenting an impediment to appreciation of what he got right, even where it was for the wrong reasons. Honestly, no-one comes out of this saga smelling of roses, although I'm left considerably more sympathetic towards Robert Heinlein - providing I don't have to read Stranger ever again; but it's a story which really needs telling given the generally unreliable testimony of science-fiction enthusiasts, because it's worth remembering that this terrible man nevertheless had great ideas, and - while we're here - L. Ron Hubbard really knew his way around a typewriter, seeing as we've apparently forgotten that detail as well*.

Astounding is surprisingly exciting, weirdly depressing, and yet fascinating; and it also explains why I've never yet fully enjoyed an issue of Analog, which was successor to Astounding and always felt as though there was something unpleasant lurking at its conservative little heart.

*: Curiously it turns out that Hubbard never particularly cared for science-fiction, which possibly explains that ropey story about Xenu and reincarnated aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. His favourite genre, so it turns out, involved pirates and the high seas. It's a shame no-one told Tom King before he sat down to write Rorschach.

Lester Del Rey Nerves (1942)
This is the novelisation - updated and expanded in 1975 - of a shorter story first published in 1942, but Lester insists it's essentially the same thing so that's what I'm going with. With the passage of time having overtaken the science-fiction element, Nerves was left beached as, I suppose, a medical thriller - not really my sort of thing, but scooped up regardless for reasons described nearly a year ago. It's set in a nuclear power plant, and the title refers to the tension which tends to mount when a nuclear power plant explodes, but also to the synaptic connections of Jorgensen, the man who knows how to stop the nuclear power plant exploding if only they can get him to wake up after the core went meltdown with himself inside.

Having been written in 1942, Nerves imagines those nuclear power plants of the future in the same way that Gernsback imagined us eventually sucking baby food from feed tubes so as to dispense with the grinding hardship of chewing. The power plant of Nerves not only supplies power to a massive community of erm… atomjacks and their families, but also manufactures super-heavy stable isotopes for use in whatever sciencey stuff we'll be doing in the future; and these super-heavy isotopes found somewhere on the periodic table way past plutonium and the others are stable, as I say, so they aren't really radioactive; but even if they were it wouldn't matter because if you're exposed to radiation there are all sorts of treatments available and in certain cases you just have a bit of a rest and you're usually fine. I suppose I should just be happy that no-one develops mysterious super powers.

Science-fiction has generally had a lousy track record in predictive terms, and Nerves is an example of science-fiction getting it really wrong. Science-fiction getting it really wrong can often be massively entertaining, but Nerves focusses on the tension, which doesn't work quite so well as it probably did in 1942, before even the immediate effects of exposure to radiation were fully understood, never mind what happens when one of the fucking things blows up. Furthermore, it attempts to weave tension from too large a cast of fairly generic characters, at least a couple of whom spend time talking about how they'll be able to pipe the waste into the local river and get rid of it that way - and these are good guys saving the day, not Mr. Burns and Smithers.

I assume Nerves was pulled out and given a fresh coat of paint partially in response to just how much the public loved their disaster movies during the seventies, but given how faithful it seemingly remains to the magazine version of 1942, it seems a little like reprinting First Men in the Moon as a Star Wars cash-in.

Omar Gohagen (editor)
Amazing Stories February 1980 (1980)
I picked this up from eBay a while back for the Simak interview but never quite got around to reading the rest, for some reason. For what it may be worth, the Simak interview is great and leaves one wishing that it were possible to go back in time and hang out with the guy; and on the subject of the direct testimony of science-fiction authors, we also get observations from Asimov, Silverberg, and Alan Dean Foster of which the latter - often unfairly criticised as a hack for churning out all those movie tie-ins - is particularly enlightening.

Amazing Stories went through a number of significant changes during its lengthy publishing history - cancellation, relocation then revival without much duplication of the success of the Gernsback years, depending upon how one defines success. The sixties version seems to have been remembered as the era of crowd-pleasing big name reprints from which original authors received nary a red cent. I'm guessing the eighties incarnation continued the tradition of great editorial savings with, in this issue, big name interviews - which presumably qualified as promotional for those interviewed - and original stories by people you've never heard of, and possibly won't hear of ever again and who were most likely glad just to be in print.

Hal Hill's Chimera is accordingly underwhelming, despite being the main feature of this issue at thirty or so pages, nearly half of which constitute the biggest extended info-dump I've read in a long time. The story itself isn't actually bad, and I'd hesitantly hail it as a prescient foreshadowing of all that cyberpunk stuff which followed soon after were it not for the fact of it reading like the tie-in to a Quinn Martin telly adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Wayne Wightman's Do Unto Others, if harmless and mercifully short, reads somewhat like the response to a high school English assignment on the theme of just deserts. Michael P. Kube-McDowell - who apparently later co-wrote something with Arthur C. Clarke - continues the scholastic theme with Antithesis, wherein the black sheep of the college physics class writes a paper proving Einstein wrong; which would be okay in itself but for the slightly depressing two page supporting essay describing what we've just read as though we hadn't understood it, delivered in the tone of Leonard Nimoy emerging from the side of the screen to explain how not everything is as it seems; or like an episode of Catfish wherein Trayvon's dilemma with the elusive Tamiqua is reiterated over and over as though we hadn't understood it the first four fucking thousand times; or like me rephrasing the same complaint in three different ways right here.

Talking of repetition, this issue embellishes each tale with a few paragraphs under the heading Why We Chose This Story attempting to reinforce the proposed excellence of each tale but mostly just delivering a redundant summary.

When you are allowed to realise what really is happening, the surprise is as incredible as it must have been for Troy Haver, who then figures how to make the mental leap to liberation after all.

We know. We've just read it.

Linda Grossman's Black Hole, may or may not be science-fiction depending upon how you interpret the story. The editor reckons it is, which feels somewhat like a clandestine attempt to smuggle literature into the magazine of robots and bug-eyed monsters. I personally don't think it is, but it doesn't matter because it's about the only thing here that's worth reading apart from the interviews.

Normal service is resumed in Flight Over XP-637 by Craig Sayre in which the twist ending is that the shape changing alien visitors are disguising themselves as ducks, which is funny because we are led to believe that they are attempting to pass themselves off as human, but they aren't! They're changing themselves into ducks, like I said! Brilliant! Hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone.

Kurt von Stuckrad's Mushroom Farmers, is one of those cold war things featuring silos full of missiles which is, as such, okay in context of its type, I suppose, providing you don't mind that one of the nuclear button pushers had also been the class stud and no woman known had ever turned him down. It didn't bother me personally, although I'm confused by the idea of there being such a thing as a class stud. I don't even know if we had those in schools back in England, although if we did I'm fairly sure it wasn't me.

Finally, and mercifully, and mercifully short too, we end with Steve Miller's, Time Cycle, which is about a bloke who travels through time on a time cycle - which is like a motorbike - hence the title. I doubt it's the same bloke, but if it is, I definitely preferred Abracadabra and the song about people calling him the space cowboy, and I didn't like those at all.

I also have to wonder if people really called him the space cowboy, because it's interesting that he doesn't seem to remember the names of any of these people in the song. Perhaps he just wanted us to believe that people called him the space cowboy.

Joseph Ross (editor) Amazing Stories (December 1965)
Well, the conclusion of Murray Leinster's Killer Ship failed to rescue the story, which is a shame; and my frown was sustained during Cordwainer Smith's On the Sand Planet, which doesn't seem to have improved since I read it as part of Quest of the Three Worlds a couple of years ago. As ever, his prose is delightfully ornate whilst failing to amount to anything, and it's not even engaging as a peculiarly incoherent ramble. Your average Burroughs cut-up text honestly communicates more than Cordwainer Smith's aesthetically pretty glossolalia.

Chad Oliver's Final Exam is approximately readable but mainly through being mercifully short, comparing the plight of indigenous Martians to that of Native Americans without any conspicuous excess of cultural sensitivity, and a tweedy professor lights up his pipe on the very first page; and continuing our cautious ascent towards reading pleasure, Robert Sheckley's Restricted Area is kind of stupid but fairly entertaining, amounting to a Star Trek away mission to a planet with an ecosystem designed by Dr. Seuss.

Finally, The Comet Doom by Edmond Hamilton reprints a story first published during the Gernsback years of Amazing as very clearly signposted by the arguably clunkier aspects of the tale; except it remains a great read regardless, presumably meaning Hamilton actually knew his way around a typewriter. It somehow manages to surprise, even to communicate a certain sense of wonder with stuff that otherwise feels vaguely familiar through repetition by numerous other writers - cybernetic invaders with organic brains inside robotic bodies, earth pulled out of its orbit, the one man who knows and who has to stop them, and so on and so forth. I think I'll see if I can't find me some more Hamilton.

Excepting Hamilton, Nowlan, and possibly Robert Sheckley, it seems fair to say that things weren't looking great for Amazing Stories during the second half of 1965 with tales which, for the most part, weren't amazing, and with the absence of anything amazing thrown into uncomfortably sharp relief by both the editorial and letters page. The latter reproduces a number of bewildering testimonials to Amazing as the most amazing of amazing things ever to amaze its amazed readership, whilst the editorial mounts a bitter campaign against the haters and those who might believe Adequate Stories to have been a more appropriate title, only to end up looking like a complete wanker with a diatribe approximating to yeah but no but yeah but no but Kurt Vonnegut thinks he's so lush now 'cos he says he don't write science-fiction and he thinks he's too good for science-fiction these days even though everybody knows he writes science-fiction and he thinks he's all that but he don't know nuffink.

Maybe it's just me.

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

David Stubbs Mars by 1980 (2018)
This is approximately the book I was hoping Paul Griffiths' Guide to Electronic Music would be, give or take some small change. As promised by the cover, it traces the history of the form from Russolo to the present, albeit with a fair bit of lateral waggle once we're past John Cage. Of course, the term electronic here encompasses plenty which isn't strictly electronic but which is at least progressive in forging an unorthodox path either at odds with, or at least adjacent to the mainstream. I suspect that any respectable attempt to cover this broad field will be obliged to take a subjective route if only for the sake of focus, which is what Stubbs does, and why his account succeeds for the most part.

Somehow this is the first time I've read about a great many of these people in this sort of detail, and the first thing I've read which has bothered to admit that Russolo's ambition - for one example - far outstripped his achievement. The reasonably lavish background detail on both Schaeffer and Stockhausen is also greatly appreciated, as is Stubb's reluctance to waste time and brain cells on Switched on fucking Bach. Of course, given the unashamedly subjective composition of this particular journey, I was left with at least a couple of questions. If Stubb's criteria for who made the cut depended on extent and spread of subsequent influence - which I suppose justifies the presence of Depeche bloody Mode - the relative absence of SPK, Hawkwind, vapourwave and more or less all rap music seems a little puzzling, although not enough so as to unbalance the whole.

The title refers to the historically Gernsbackian thrust of electronic music as something which looks to the future, a quality which might be deemed inherent to the exploratory nature of the form; then asks whether or not this is something we have lost in recent times. It's a good question, although I'm not convinced that it can have a single coherent answer, depending as it does on who and when we're asking. I personally suspect that there's something in Lawrence Miles' ghostpoint which proposes that innovation itself may have ceased for our culture, replaced by cyclical revision with each leap forward being no more significant than the latest smartphone - nothing but updates as far as the eye can see; but it's a pessimistic view and possibly works only as a rhetorical generalisation. Stubbs seems to conclude that the current standard bearers for electronic music demonstrate the same creative vitality as their ancestors, despite the increasing ubiquity of the form, and he's probably right.

The only problem I see with this account is that as an argument for the revolution remaining continuous, it hangs together, but only just, being stretched thin across a dizzyingly broad span of digressions and rabbit holes - all fascinating, but which tend to distract from the theme as a result; but this is a minor quibble which shouldn't really be taken as a complaint given that the journey seems to be the point here, and frankly it doesn't get much better than this.

I've always thought David Stubbs was a great writer, but this is exceptional beyond my expectations.

H.G. Wells The War in the Air (1908)
The general consensus seems divided as to the quality of Wells' later work, or at least his less well-remembered work. My take is that, based on what I've read, you're probably better off sticking with War of the Worlds, First Men in the Moon, and the ones you've already heard of because they're mostly at least as amazing as their respective legends would have it. In the Days of the Comet is decent, but probably not so astonishing as earlier novels, and The Food of the Gods is massively underwhelming - an interesting story struggling to free itself from beneath a duvet of creaking gags and supposedly comic characters. The War in the Air struggles with similar whimsy but mostly keeps the balance to just the right side of readable. Of course, history itself has somewhat overtaken this novel and readers may need to remind themselves of what a wonder powered flight must once have seemed. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men foresaw the aircraft as such a radical invention as to inspire what would become a new religion, and in the art world there were the Italian Aeropainters - about whom no-one really likes to say too much these days - but the miracle of aviation has since been lost somewhere within the general thrust of technological progress.

Once again, Wells tends to fall flat as an author of predictive science fiction, his flapping flying machines belonging to the same oubliette as the feeding tubes which Hugo Gernsback had believed would put an end to the misery of mastication. Although this isn't to suggest that this novel lacks purpose or fails to say anything of interest, and certainly it predicted the change in the zeitgeist brought about by the first world war, if not necessarily the means by which it was fought. Our main character is one Bert Smallways of Bromley, Kent. Smallways - who probably would have worked just as well without his speech rendered in phonetic south London - is one of Wells' working class types who thankfully manages to stay just the right side of turning into Will Hay or George Formby, and who finds his parochial existence cast rudely upon the wider world stage through a faintly improbable encounter with an inventor. Manned flight is developed and swiftly spreads, and the entire world is suddenly at war. Combatants are no longer obliged to fight along a limited earthbound front and are now able to attack the enemy from above, far behind the traditional lines. Finding himself aboard a German airship as it bombs New York, Smallways accordingly comes to a realisation.

Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of war as being a jolly, smashing, exciting affair, something like a Bank Holiday rag on a large scale, and on the whole agreeable and exhilarating. Now he knew it a little better.

Technological progress has forever changed the dynamic of war, as did, it could be argued, the first world war a few years later.

Nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways might lift his head proudly and vote for war and spirited foreign policy, and go secure from such horrible things.

Wells takes a typically pessimistic view, and so The War in the Air effectively bombs the human race back into the stone age, the message being at least as much to do with human nature as the technological progress which allows us to express its worst aspects.

The development of science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer possible, a newer, wider synthesis was not only needed but imperatively demanded.

Wells' view is that such a synthesis is vital but unlikely because we as a species tend to take for granted the universal nobility of our own intentions, so the argument is, as ever, not whether we can do something, but whether we should. The above principal applies just as well now as it did in 1908 and might be considered with regard to the sort of cultural homogeneity and amplification of stupidity which the internet has brought about.

The War in the Air is far from Wells' greatest but its only real failing is, arguably, that it would have worked as well with about half the page count. Otherwise, it's respectable, and only truly suffers through War of the Worlds and others having been such tough acts to follow.

Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

My father gathered his five or six allies at the crest of a low yellow dune, and waited for the charge. As the yelling lancers came down the opposite slope, he walked boldly out alone to meet them, with the grave statement that he was their new ruler, sent from the Sun.