I’m currently listening to HG Wells’ War of The Worlds as an audiobook — the first time I have ‘read’ this book in years¹.
In my experience it is worth going back to books you’ve read before because there is always something new to discover. What has struck me most strongly this time is just how prescient Wells ideas were in this book written in 1897.
Not simply the science fiction of death rays (he describes something equivalent to a high powered laser), armoured killing machines and poison gas but the vision of indiscriminate industrial warfare with soldiers strolling from tranches towards their death. Written just 17 years before the ‘great’ war.
[1] Michael Sheen makes a very good ‘Richard Burton’.↑