All Articles Tagged 'quote' (11)

Chapter 11: The Great Collapse

"But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the twentieth century with the condition of any previous period in his history, then perhaps we may begin to understand something of that blind confidence. It was not so much a reasoned confidence as the inevitable consequence of sustained good fortune. By such standards as they possessed, things HAD gone amazingly well for them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for the first time…

Chapter 11: The Great Collapse

"And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war."

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Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"Much of this artillery was still unmounted, and nearly all of it was unprotected when the German air-fleet reached New York. And down in the crowded streets, when that occurred, the readers of the New York papers were regaling themselves with wonderful and wonderfully illustrated accounts of such matters as:--

THE SECRET OF THE THUNDERBOLT

AGED SCIENTIST PERFECTS ELECTRIC GUN

TO ELECTROCUTE AIRSHIP CREWS BY UPWARD…

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt perhaps even more certainly than the English had done that war in their own land was an impossible thing. In that they shared the delusion of all North America. They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked their money…

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"It was the peculiar shape of Manhattan Island, pressed in by arms of the sea on either side, and incapable of comfortable expansion, except along a narrow northward belt, that first gave the New York architects their bias for extreme vertical dimensions. Every need was lavishly supplied them--money, material, labour; only space was restricted. To begin, therefore, they built high perforce. But to do so was to discover a whole new world of…

Chapter 6: How War Came to New York

"The City of New York was in the year of the German attack the largest, richest, in many respects the most splendid, and in some, the wickedest city the world had ever seen. She was the supreme type of the City of the Scientific Commercial Age; she displayed its greatness, its power, its ruthless anarchic enterprise, and its social disorganisation most strikingly and completely. She had long ousted London from her pride of place as the modern…

Chapter 5: The Battle of the North Atlantic

"The incident that gave him his third shock was the execution of one of the men on the Adler for carrying a box of matches. The case was a flagrant one. The man had forgotten he had it upon him when coming aboard. Ample notice had been given to every one of the gravity of this offence, and notices appeared at numerous points all over the airships. The man's defence was that he had grown so used to the notices and had been so…

Chapter 5: The Battle of the North Atlantic

"Bert was in his cabin, and chanced to see the dew vanish from the window and caught the gleam of sunlight outside. He looked out, and saw once more that sunlit cloud floor he had seen first from the balloon, and the ships of the German air-fleet rising one by one from the white, as fish might rise an become visible from deep water. He stared for a moment and then ran out to the little gallery to see this wonder better. Below was…

Originally published in 1907, a year before the Wright Brothers showcased their powered gliders at Kitty Hawk with an astounding (for the time) two minutes of flight, HG Wells was describing the effect that flying machines would have in warfare. The War in the Air starts in an alternate reality Victorian England where monorail lines hold the counties together like a cat's cradle, and the city people enjoy technological privileges unheard of at the time.

With the spectre of…