Word: wellsians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...London's Tribune was moved to a Wellsian note by a rumor that a German super-rocket bomb, launched two weeks ago, had not yet been heard from. Said the Tribune, in interplanetary vein: "If that world [hit by the runaway rocket] happens to be inhabited by people who have reached our own level of 'civilization,' they may regard it as an act of hostility. . . .Are we on the eve of war between worlds before we have got ourselves tidied up on earth...
...Flight into outer space," exclaimed Harry Harper, a spokesman for the new Combined British Astronautical Societies, "is no longer a Jules Verne or Wellsian dream." His British group includes able young chemists, physicists and plane engineers. In spare-time work on their hobby, they have laid out a campaign, to start with the launching of experimental rockets 60 miles into space,* and culminating in a three-man jorney in a 1,000-ton space ship, already designed, to the moon...
...reported the correspondence between a devil in hell and one of his earthly minions, has Philologist Ransom carried off to Mars by a couple of scheming scientists. This well-worn device is intended to provide readers with an astronomically detached view of life on earth. The result is sub-Wellsian fantasy, tinted with irony and as pitted with morality as Pilgrim's Progress. The findings are not flattering to earthworms, some of whom may feel that Elwin Ransom might have got just as far without going such a distance...
...elements into a cohesive story. At times able director McCarey seems close to doing it. In the opening sequences the scenes vibrate with the same effervescent youthfulness that the leads are able to exude. But when the complications set in, the whole thing misses the boat. At the fantastic, Wellsian climax, the audience is left with the feeling that Naziism should be left to the tragedians, and that future attempts at comedy should content themselves with less world-shaking themes...
...never to do: listen to reason and quit being careful. The same instruments, Wells argues, which have made Tewlers what they are—and the world what it is—can also make the world one community for the teaching, healing saving of Homo Tewler—for the establishment, indeed, of the Wellsian World State towards which this volume like much of his life's work, is a combined gadfly and sales talk. These instruments are chiefly the radio and the cinema—what Wells calls "canned teaching." The knowledge Wells would have them impart is chiefly scientific. As a reason for remaking...