Bert Smallways, a cheerful bicycle-shop hand from a London suburb, floats off in a runaway balloon and lands among the German air-fleet as it sets out to strike America. From the airship Vaterland he watches New York bombed and a single assault widen into a world war that the fragile machinery of civilisation cannot withstand.
Written in 1907, years before aerial bombing was real, it is one of Wells’s sharpest warnings about technology and war. Download the free EPUB.