Category: Fantastic Transport
Wells’s was an imagination in a hurry: he always wanted to arrive in the future more quickly than the present-day world would allow. His fiction imagined many kinds of fantastic technologies of transport, from the Time Machine, to the Martian’s tripods, to moving walkways, to aeroplanes and spacecraft.
H. G. Wells. ‘The Land Ironclads.’ The Strand Magazine, 26, no. 156 (December 1903): 751-64.‘The Land Ironclads’ prophetically sees trench warfare resolved by the technologically superior side’s invention of tanks.
H. G. Wells. ‘The First Men in the Moon.’ The Strand Magazine, 20, no. 120 (December 1900): 697-705.In this romance, Wells imagines a substance called ‘Cavorite’, after its inventor, which is resistant to gravity. The heroes build a sphere made of Cavorite and travel to the moon, where they encounter the insect-like alien race the Selenites.
H. G. Wells. The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted. Illustrated by A. C. Michael. London: George Bell and Sons, 1908.Wells foresaw powered flight as early as 1900’s Anticipations. In The War in the Air, Wells predicts a war between Germany and the alliance of Britain and the United States; the invention of powerful aircraft and the bombing of civilian populations that reduces civilization back to the level of the Iron Age.
