during World War I, the combat that Wells envisioned here. He even saw 9/11 and the Iraq War, pegging Western European complaceny so accurately that I felt my jaw drop to the floor on a few occasions. Honestly, this H. G. guy was one in a billion. He was utterly, incalculably brilliant. He was also a helluva writer, expressing ideas with flashes of humor, irony, and passion. Wells uses a countryside Englishman as witness to the fall of civilization, and manages to effortlessly switch between the epic canvas of war and the cameo portrait of a normal man seeing everything he ever understood about the world fray apart before his eyes. In a terrific last stroke, Wells writes the final chapter that sums up the possibility that "progess" may be an illusion. This novel deserves to be considered amongst Wells finest, and this new edition with Duncan's insightful introduction, may be the firest step in getting it the wide audience it deserves. First, before anything else, he links us to a character, a man named Bert Smallways, who we will follow and this allows us to see what is happening from the view of a normal man within the book. The first few chapters in fact deal only with Bert, pushing much of the major events into the background, suggested by news headlines that nobody seems to notice. But when wars come it comes with a bam. The Earth's weapons seem to be bomb carrying airships and gun carrying airplanes.