Dry Ice Factory

Reading H.G. Wells, you quickly realize why he is one of the most famous and respected science fiction writers of all time. He's very good, and brimming with subtle observations, droll wit, and exuberant humor. I have just read a scene in The First Men in the Moon (1901) in which Bedford and Cavor, lost and starving on the surface of the moon, try the local fungus and start tripping: "Then our blood began to run warmer, and we tingled at the lips and fingers, and then new and slightly irrelevant ideas came bubbling up in our minds."

There follows a hilariously idiotic "argument" between the two about the discovery and colonization of the moon in which Wells gets in several smart cracks at imperialism (including a mention of the White Man's Burden, which had just been published in 1899), and then comes a slapstick episode in which they are spotted for the first time by the Selenites (the insectoid lunar aliens), causing the deranged Cavor to make a furious running leap at them. "He leapt badly; he made a series of somersaults in the air, whirled right over them, and vanished with an enormous splash amidst the cactus bladders. What the Selenites made of this amazing, and to my mind undignified, irruption from another planet, I have no means of guessing."

The notion of first contact with the aliens while under the influence of mushrooms seems to be torn from a New Wave story of the 1960s. The grinning way in which Wells plays with the perception of unreal reality is damned literate. He's really very good.

Update: Corrected "lost and starving on the surface of the mood," although that's a pretty interesting typo!

H.G. Wells' short story "The Land Ironclads" is famous for "predicting" the tank (cough, ahem). However, what strikes me about it is the characterization of the two sides of the war, which seem to be two different classes, although they are referred to as townsmen and, uh, people who live in the open air. Very strange. Who are these open air people who oppose the townsmen and their civilisation? Here's some description:

[The war correspondent] was depressed. He believed that there were other things in life better worth having than proficiency in war; he believed that in the heart of civilisation, for all its stresses, its crushing concentrations of forces, its injustice and suffering, there lay something that might be the hope of the world; and the idea that any people, by living in the open air, hunting perpetually, losing touch with books and art and all the things that intensify life, might hope to resist and break that great development to the end of time, jarred on his civilised soul.

Apt to this thought came a file of the defender soldiers, and passed him in the gleam of a swinging lamp that marked the way.

He glanced at their red-lit faces, and one shone out for a moment, a common type of face in the defender's ranks: ill-shaped nose, sensuous lips, bright clear eyes of alert cunning, slouch hat cocked on one side and adorned with the peacock's plume of the rustic Don Juan turned soldier, a hard brown skin, a sinewy frame, and open, tireless stride, and a master's grip on the rifle."

The war correspondent returned their salutations and went on his way.

"Louts," he whispered. "Cunning, elementary louts. And they are going to beat the townsmen at the game of war!"

But who are these people? They are opposed to city folk, so I suppose they are country folk, but it's quite a caricature. Ill-shaped nose and sensuous lips? Bertie, what are you on about? I thought city folk were the ones with sensuous lips!