I think in the process of getting older I have endeavored to appreciate the pioneers in creativity. Like when you listen to a Chuck Berry song, it is easy to go, "Sounds like normal rock n roll", but the thing is, in the mid to late 1950's, nobody was playing the guitar like that. When you watch the original Star Wars, it is easy to say, "The special effects are ok", but the thing is, in the late 1970's, that was a huge leap in movie making.
So, in that same line I try to appreciate the real pioneers of Science Fiction. SciFi (and it's close cousin, Horror) is one of those genres that is done so poorly, so often, that is is easy to dismiss it as pop culture junk. But if you seek out the original creators and their original work, such as Shelley, Stoker, Wells, Verne, Matheson, etc., you will find some great work that stood equal with their peers in the 19th and 20th centuries. And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, these guys are the most flattered writers in the Western Hemisphere. Their ideas have been copied and re-hashed so many times it is mind boggling to consider it.
So I picked up The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells a few weeks ago. This was my first Wells novel. I have to say that I didn't know much about the story other than the old tale about the radio broadcast in 1938 that made a real state of emergency and I have seen the Tom Cruise re-make. Which has some narration by Morgan Freeman so of course it is good. Anyway, I was really impressed with the far reaching ideas that all started with Wells. This book was published in 1898. The high tech accomplishments at the time were the Maxim machine gun, the bicycle, and the glider. There was no powered flight. There was no space travel. Yet somehow he almost essentially invented the idea of the alien invasion, the flying disk, the tentacles that grab people, the idea that aliens would have over developed brains and communicate through telepathy, the ray gun, and a host of other alien invasion/apocalypse ideas that have permeated every piece of SciFi over the past century. I was particularly struck by the tentacle scene in the house when the curate is killed. It seemed straight out of The Abyss. His visions of London could be in an episode of The Walking Dead. The conflicts between the humans and the aliens could be straight from Independence Day or 10 Cloverfield Lane. And although I didn't expect to have this opinion, the Tom Cruise adaptation is actually not that bad of job.
Anyway, I plan to continue my exploration of the roots of SciFi. I think some Verne is next on my list!
