The Complete War of the Worlds (2001)

This is a multimedia collection of primary and secondary works about H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds and Orson Welles' 1938 radio play. It contains:

1. Forward (Ray Bradbury)
2. Introduction (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
3. A short biography of Orson Welles and history of the radio play (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
4. Mars in popular culture (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
5. A short biography of H.G.Wells and history of the book (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
6. Transcript of Orson's radio play (Howard Kotch [w/ Welles])
7. The complete text of the novel (H. G. Wells)
8. Afterword (Ben Bova)
9. An audio-CD including 5 tracks:
9a. "The War of the Worlds", the complete 1938 play (1 hour)
9b. Orson Welles press conference the day after
9c. H.G and Orson co-interviewed in 1940.
9d. An excerpt from a 1968 radio version in Buffalo, NY that caused similar panic
9e. An excerpt of Orson looking back on the play 40 years after.
10. Many illustrations and pictures.

This is a very generous book. Even if you already own the novel, there is enough supplemental here to make it worth having. My only complaint is that H. G. Welles original book is not very good, until Orson immortalized it on radio in 1938 (with substantial changes) it was not one of H.G.'s most well known works. Indeed, Orson's adaptation is genius, while H.G.'s story is mostly derivative of the existing genre known as Invasion Literature which was very popular in the run up to World War I. Having already read Ther Battle of Dorking (1871) I felt like I was reading it all over again, but less convincing, repetitive and sort of sappy. If it hadn't been for Orson's radio play I suspect the novel would be a minor work of H.G. Wells and not the iconic 20th century story it has become. Luckily the hour long broadcast is freely available online, but this book, if found cheap enough, is a great resource and a lot of fun.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )