Other editions of book The War in the Air

“This here Progress,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.” “You'd hardly think it could keep on,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways made this remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden and surveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praised nor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapes appeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, and grew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder—balloons in course of inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoon ascent. “They goes up every Saturday,” said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, the milkman. “It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out to see a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country has its weekly-outings—uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gas companies.”

The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted, a military science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, written in four months in 1907 and serialised and published in 1908 in The Pall Mall Magazine, is like many of Wells's works notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts—in this case, the use of the aircraft for the purpose of warfare and the coming of World War I. The novel's hero is Bert Smallways, a "forward-thinking young man" and a "kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-'ave-a-look-at-it and enamel-chipping variety."

“This here Progress,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.” “You'd hardly think it could keep on,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways made this remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden and surveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praised nor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapes appeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, and grew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder—balloons in course of inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoon ascent. “They goes up every Saturday,” said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, the milkman. “It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out to see a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country has its weekly-outings—uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gas companies.” “Larst Satiday I got three barrer-loads of gravel off my petaters,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. “Three barrer-loads! What they dropped as ballase. Some of the plants was broke, and some was buried.” “Ladies, they say, goes up!” “I suppose we got to call 'em ladies,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. “Still, it ain't hardly my idea of a lady—flying about in the air, and throwing gravel at people. It ain't what I been accustomed to consider ladylike, whether or no.” Mr. Stringer nodded his head approvingly, and for a time they continued to regard the swelling bulks with expressions that had changed from indifference to disapproval. Mr. Tom Smallways was a green-grocer by trade and a gardener by disposition; his little wife Jessica saw to the shop, and Heaven had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately Heaven had not planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessant change, and in parts where its operations were unsparingly conspicuous. Vicissitude was in the very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon a yearly tenancy, and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it not so much a garden as an eligible building site. He was horticulture under notice to quit, the last patch of country in a district flooded by new and (other) things. He did his best to console himself, to imagine matters near the turn of the tide.

At the epochal time of the perfection of the practical air-ship, Bert Smallways, a little cockney with the vague, narrow brain and scanty knowledge of his kind, in trying to land the balloon of Butteridge, inventor of the only perfect flying-machine, is carried away in it and into Germany. The balloon is shot down by the Germans at the great works where their air war-ships are being built, and Bert falls with it, wearing Butteridge's outside coats and carrying the secret plans, which he found in them. He is at first mistaken for Butteridge, and is hurried into the flag-ship Prince Karl Albert,—a man compared to Nietzsche's Overman—which, with Bert aboard, starts at once, leading the world's first fleet of air war-ships to the United States, the country to be first attacked in Karl Albert's scheme of world conquest. Bert finds the Germans have been negotiating with Butteridge for the purchase of his plans, and decides to copy them and conceal the originals. On its way to the States, the air-fleet diverges to pursue the American war-ships steaming to the Panama Canal and fighting German ironclads. It destroys them; and turns toward New York …

The War in the Air, a military science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, written in four months in 1907 and serialised and published in 1908 in The Pall Mall Magazine, is like many of Wells's works notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts—in this case, the use of the aircraft for the purpose of warfare and the coming of World War I. The novel's hero is Bert Smallways, a "forward-thinking young man" and a "kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-'ave-a-look-at-it and enamel-chipping variety."

The War in the Air CHAPTER I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY 1 “This here Progress,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.” “You'd hardly think it could keep on,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways made this remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden and surveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praised nor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapes appeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, and grew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder--balloons in course of inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoon ascent. “They goes up every Saturday,” said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, the milkman. “It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out to see a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country has its weekly-outings--uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gas companies.” “Larst Satiday I got three barrer-loads of gravel off my petaters,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. “Three barrer-loads! What they dropped as ballase. Some of the plants was broke, and some was buried.” “Ladies, they say, goes up!” “I suppose we got to call 'em ladies,” said Mr. Tom Smallways.

“This here Progress,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.” “You'd hardly think it could keep on,” said Mr. Tom Smallways. It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways made this remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden and surveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praised nor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapes appeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, and grew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder—balloons in course of inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoon ascent. “They goes up every Saturday,” said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, the milkman. “It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out to see a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country has its weekly-outings—uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gas companies.”

"The War In The Air", war novel written in 1907 by H. G. Wells, is often referenced because in it Wells so accurately anticipated lots of details of aerial warfare – dogfights, bombing raids, even what the earth looks like from up in the air – none of which existed or were possible when he wrote the book and when the most primitive flying machines had only just been invented.In other words, it is a masterpiece of imaginative prophecy and another one of Wells’s books, in that it’s a real mish-mash of subject matter and tone.Thus he chooses to recount the outbreak of this epic world war (sometime around 1914, i.e. in his then-future) and the triumph of the mighty German airfleet – via the adventures of the comic figure of Bert Smallways, keeper of a failed second-hand bicycle shop in suburban Kent. Bathos.

The War in the Air, a military science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, written in four months in 1907 and serialised and published in 1908 in The Pall Mall Magazine, is like many of Wells's works notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts—in this case, the use of the aircraft for the purpose of warfare and the coming of World War I. The novel's hero is Bert Smallways, a "forward-thinking young man" and a "kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-'ave-a-look-at-it and enamel-chipping varietyPlot summaryThe first three chapters of The War in the Air relate details of the life of Bert Smallways and his extended family in a location called Bun Hill, a (fictional) former Kentish village that had become a London suburb within living memory. The story begins with Bert's brother Tom, a stolid greengrocer who views technological progress with apprehension, and their aged father, who recalls with longing the time when Bun Hill was a quiet village and he had driven the local squire's carriage. However, the story soon focuses on Bert who is an unimpressive, not particularly gifted, unsuccessful young man with few ideas about larger things is but far from unintelligent. He has a strong attachment to a young woman named Edna.

This thrilling tale is H. G. Wells at his modernist, visionary best. In 1907, a naive Londoner named Bert Smallways finds himself an unwitting passenger on a fleet of German airships heading over the Atlantic to attack New York. What unfolds in characteristically Wellsian fashion is a clash of early flying machines that leaves Gotham in shambles and unleashes the terrible age of Total War. Uncannily relevant to our own era, The War in the Air remains a cornerstone of early science fiction.