The War in the Air

What It's About

Bert Smallways is an ordinary young bicycle-shop owner from the small English town of Bun Hill, full of half-formed dreams of adventure and modernity. Through a bizarre accident involving a runaway hot-air balloon, he is mistaken for Mr. Butteridge, an English inventor in possession of secret flying-machine plans, and finds himself swept up into the aerial fleet of the German Prince Karl Albert. From this absurd beginning, Bert becomes an unwilling witness to a German aerial assault on New York, which triggers a rapid escalation as other nations mobilise their own air fleets. What starts as a single act of aggression spirals into a global conflict that no one can control or win, and Bert, the bewildered "little man," finds himself carried along as the old certainties of the modern world begin to unravel around him.

Key Concepts

Written in 1908, years before the First World War, the novel is best known for its remarkably prescient vision of aerial bombardment and mechanised warfare. Wells uses the story to warn that technological progress had far outpaced political wisdom and international cooperation, so that nations now possessed the means to destroy one another without any real ability to negotiate a peace. The choice of Bert Smallways, an unremarkable everyman with no real understanding of the forces around him, allows Wells to satirise the complacency and insularity of Edwardian society, and to suggest that ordinary people would be swept up in, and largely powerless against, the consequences of decisions made by nations and inventors far above their heads.

About the Author

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern science fiction. Trained in the sciences under Thomas Huxley, he brought a strong interest in biology, technology, and social progress into his fiction, and used speculative and futuristic scenarios as a means of examining contemporary political and social concerns.