I saw this book acknowledged in Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind, so, in a moment of rare impulse book buying and reading, I bought it and read it immediately.

Review: The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg & Beyond, Peter J. Beck, 2016.

In 1895, H. G. Wells moved to Woking, Surrey. He was almost thirty, a journalist and writer on the make. Plagued by a kidney and liver injured playing football and with lungs that occasionally bled from the foul air of London, he wasn’t sure how much time he had left.

And he had bills to pay and a new wife, his second, to support.

His reputation wasn’t secure. The Time Machine had been critically acclaimed, but The Island of Dr. Moreau was not popular with readers or critics.

When he left Woking after finishing the first version of The War of the Worlds, his reputation was secured, and he became a writer with an international following. Money followed which was a good thing because he would need it for all his many mistresses and illegitimate children. (Wells’ stated cure for writer’s block was sex twice a day and that often was not with his wife.)

What Beck and publisher Bloomsbury Academic present is a literary biography of Wells’ novel and all its multimedia adaptations that followed Continue reading →