Wells, H. G.

Wells, Herbert George. Note evaluation by I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, ch. 3, p. 87:

The theme of The War of the Worlds was scientific warfare taken to the limit. It was the prelude to a sequence of similar stories — War in the Air, The World Set Free, The Shape of Things to Come — in which Wells went on to deal with the conflict between outdated but still-with-us institutions and the urgent need to adjust everything (techniques, education, attitudes of mind, social practices) to the new world that science had called into existence. The struggle between the old and new tormented Wells. In one way he saw it as the struggle between traditional practices in eduction and the new approaches required to prepare the citizens for life in a technological epoch. Another form was the contrast he saw between the old-style close-combat battles of the Victorian school primers and the swift world-wide wars of the future. The one reflected the other. As Wells saw the situation, when he was writing Anticipations in 1900, two of the principal factors working to change the course of human life in the twentieth century were 'the steady development of a new and quite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of the expansion of science and mechanism' and 'the absolute revolution in the art of war that science and mechanism are bringing about'. (Quoting Wells, Anticipations [1902 edn.], p. 212)

RDE, finishing, 15Dec20