Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 2.pdf/24

Rh The air fighting reads queerly nowadays, but when it is remembered—and there will be a footnote at the proper place to remind the reader of the fact—that it was imagined ten years before there was any flying and fifteen years before there was fighting in the air, then its oddity will be understandable. The idea that special landing and starting stages would be necessary was very prevalent then; the story turns on it. Most of the early experimental machines, Maxim's for example, got up speed on a rail before they jumped into the air. There is a great exaggeration of instability and of the technical difficulty of flying. The final nose-dive was in the original version, but the spin and one or two other realistic touches have been put in. Even the automobiles described in this story, let the reader remember, are intelligent anticipations. When this book was written there was a speed-limit for mechanically propelled vehicles in England of four miles an hour.

I will not discuss the thesis of the story at any length here because the reader will find that done in "Anticipations," a later volume in this series. It will be clear that the chief assumptions upon which the scene is framed amount to a prolongation of the lines of tendency that were most conspicuous in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The analysis of these tendencies and their possible persistence, is very slight. The story was written ten years before any flying-machine got off the ground, but the flying is, I submit, fairly well imagined, and it is interesting in the light of recent events to find that the idea of black troops being brought from Africa to xii