The War of the Worlds

I suffer from the curse of being incredibly young, so I recently discovered that I've yet to read any Wells. In all of my years of being a science fiction fan, I've never read any text by the father of the genre. My first step in fixing this problem was War of the Worlds. This Victorian novel which is one of the first incidents of an alien invasion story was more fascinating than engaging. It suffers from pre-cinema pacing but I found the scientific knowledge used to explain the aliens absolutely charming. The most noteworthy thing we learn from the aliens in this book is the power of flight! I found the anti-imperialism themes very interesting, especially how they were tied in with environmentalist ideas. It's interesting that the first alien invasion story is designed to bring attention to how we have mistreated plants, animals and other human beings in the past with our powerful drive to acquire more and more land. My only complaint is that the ending goes against these themes. The aliens are brought down by the fact that they never discovered the wheel or germ theory, thus proving that human beings are advancing at just the right speed, and are rightfully the good guys.