H. G. Wells ~6 hr read

Bumbling everyman Bert Smallways is accidentally swept aloft in a balloon into the middle of a devastating world war fought in the skies, and watches modern civilization torn apart from above.

H. G. Wells's 1908 novel is a strikingly prophetic dystopian and military-SF tale. Sweeping, alarming, visionary. Read it for one of Wells's great prophecies, the terror of aerial warfare foreseen years before it came true, as fleets of airships and flying machines bring cities to ruin, in a chilling vision of technology outrunning human wisdom.

In its time

Published in 1908, during the 1900s, the scientific romance.

Reading it

~6 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).