The War in the Air was published by George Bell and Sons in October 1908, after serialization in the Pall Mall Magazine from January 1908, and is the novel that most dramatically vindicated Wells’s reputation as a prophet. Writing six years before World War I, Wells described a global war fought primarily from the air — fleets of airships and aeroplanes destroying cities, sinking navies, and reducing civilization to rubble. By 1945, every element of his prediction had been fulfilled.
The Novel
Bert Smallways, a bicycle mechanic from Bun Hill in Kent, is accidentally carried to Germany by a runaway balloon and finds himself aboard a German airship fleet crossing the Atlantic to attack the United States. He witnesses the destruction of New York’s fleet in the Atlantic, the bombing of Manhattan, and the subsequent entry of China and Japan into a global war that escalates beyond anyone’s control.
Wells’s stroke of genius is the viewpoint character: Bert is not a strategist or a scientist but an ordinary, not-very-bright working-class man, bewildered by the catastrophe unfolding around him and completely unable to influence it. This perspective gives the novel its emotional force — the experience of modern total war as seen from below, by someone who has no idea what is happening or why.
Themes
Technology and civilization — Wells argues that military technology has outpaced political institutions. Nations can build aircraft and bombs, but they cannot build the international governance structures needed to prevent their use. This insight, published in 1908, would take two world wars and the creation of the United Nations to (partially) address.
The fragility of civilization — once the bombing starts, civilization collapses with astonishing speed. Supply chains break. Cities empty. Governments fall. The novel’s final chapters describe a post-apocalyptic England that would not look out of place in a modern dystopian novel.
Class — Bert’s helplessness is partly a class issue. He is a victim of decisions made by people he will never meet, in countries he cannot find on a map, for reasons he cannot understand. This is Wells’s most politically radical insight: that modern war is something done TO the working class, not BY them.
Collecting The War in the Air
First edition (George Bell and Sons, London, 1908): Blue cloth binding with illustration on front cover. No dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine copies: $1,500–$4,000
- Very good: $600–$1,500
- Good: $200–$600
First American edition (Macmillan, New York, 1908): Published simultaneously. $500–$1,500.
Wells himself added a preface to the 1921 reissue noting how accurately the novel had predicted the air war of 1914–1918, and another preface in 1941 noting its prediction of the Blitz. This self-vindicating quality makes the novel a perennial curiosity.