It seems that I come back to Herbert George Wells on the regular basis - every now on than, I will visit or re-visit some of his classic novels and they always give me a lot of pleasure. He was often being called "father of science fiction" but I would rather group him together with Jules Verne who was sort of his French counterpart. In fact, the connection is real here - both men wrote about human visit to the Moon at the time when this was really just a speculative fiction. Verne published his "From the Earth to the Moon" some 30 years earlier and it obviously impressed young Wells who gives it his own twist here. I can't honestly compare these two novels because although I am sure that I read Verne, it must have been decades ago and I remember practically nothing of it (+ mixing it with "Journey to the Center of the Earth" that also have tunnels and craters).
What did I read from Herbert George Wells so far:
The Time Machine (1895)
The Wonderful Visit (1895)
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
The War of the Worlds (1898)
The First Men in the Moon (1901)
The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1909)
I have somehow missed "The Invisible Man", maybe because I own classic old 1933 film so felt familiar with it, but should definitely correct this. "The First Men in the Moon" has its moments but its by far the lesser Wells - it starts good but he gets bogged down by scientific ideas that bring the story to a crawling pace, than towards the end it just meanders. I still love the man and enjoy his novels but this might be my least favourite of his.
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