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bipolarber -> RE: Writing that inspires you? (11/8/2007 4:21:03 PM)
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Oh, I agree on Wells. People today are still using his work as the basis for movies, for new books based on his work, TV shows... (You don't see that happening with Verne, although Verne can be credited with inventing "hard" science fiction.) Wells was the man who didn't just imagine the future, he thought about what the future meant. Social science fiction was his invention. (Don't worry about how it all works, concentrate on what it does to the people!)
If you really, really like Wells, you might want to pick up the book, "War of the Worlds: The Global Dispatches." A really fun anthology of various writers imagining what other historical figures of the time were doing during the "martian invasion" of 1898. Teddy Roosevelt, Percival Lowell, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, among others, all have a scrape with those tentacles beasties.
The one thing that made me fall in love with Wells: He really knew how to cast a near hypnotic spell with his opening words:
"No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that this world was being watched, keenly and closely, by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own..."
Or...
"The man who made the time machine- the man I shall call the Time Traveller- was well known in scientific circles a few years since, and the fact of his disappearance is also well known...."
Or...
"As I sit down to write here, amidst the shadows of the vine leaves under the blue sky of Southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of purest accident. It might have been anyone..."
I mean, how could anyone, especially a kid in junior high school, resist books that started with lines like that?!
Yes, batshalom, I'm a geek about H.G. too! :)
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