Three brave warriors--a prince from an ancient house, a former envoy of the Pharaoh, and the daughter of the Albi--struggle against an empire to establish a new world order around the monument at Stonehenge

Stonehenge

History

Stover, Leon E.

Harrison. Harry

Europe

Scribner

H.G. Wells' novel, a "scientific romance," attained perhaps its greatest fame in another form, the infamous realistic 1939 radio broadcast "Invasion from Mars" by the redoubtable Orson Welles. It was also notably made into an early fifties science fiction adventure movie (and there have been other adaptations as well). So indelible is the association that the novel, like the panic inducing broadcast and the Hollywood flick, now is taken as little more than a light fantasy of outerspace terror and human heroism. This is far from the author's original vision. Like the other scientific romances treated in the Annotated H.G. Wells series, The War of the Worlds is a philosophical tale and as such, is profoundly ideological. The world of the Martians represents the progressive future of humanity in a cultural war with our world of tradition and reaction-these are the two worlds in question. The Mars from which the invaders come is united by a planet-wide system of irrigation canals; for Wells this indicates a socialist world-state, as claimed by the American astronomer Percival Lowell. The red planet is red in more than one sense, pointing the direction of terrestrial progress. The Martians in the novel are octopoidal monsters, bodily anticipating the tentacular, all-controlling totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. To those familiar with Wells' works only through film, this acclaimed series annotated by the world's premier Wellsian scholar, Leon Stover, will be a real eye-opener. The historical, philosophical, and literary contexts of Wells' scientific romances are thoroughly examined. All editions are in library binding, with an introduction, appendices, bibliography and index.

The War of the Worlds: A Critical Text of the 1898 London First Edition, With an Introduction, Illustrations and Appendices (Annotated H. G. Wells)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Wells., H.G

Science Fiction

McFarland Publishing

As a publisher's category, science fiction began in the American pulp magazine industry in 1926. But its origins lay in the British tradition of the scientific romance, whose mastery by H.G. Wells in his Victorian youth (1895-1901) makes him the "father of modern SF" (Jules Verne is a more distant ancestor). Wells's most self-conscious descendant is Robert Heinlein, whose rapid rise to fame during the magazine era made him "the dean of American SF." He so succeeded in winning literary recognition for the genre that it all but vanished into the mainstream, save for a lingering identity in classified paperbacks and in television programming (Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, for example, was marketed as general fiction and not science fiction). 
The present work, by a man who taught the subject at the university level for decades, is a critical examination of the literary trajectory of science fiction from the scientific romances of H.G. Wells to the era of Robert Heinlein. Such luminaries as Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Arthur C. Clarke (2001), A.E. van Vogt (Slan), L. Sprague de Camp (Lest Darkness Fall), Harry Harrison (Stars and Stripes Forever trilogy), Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan), Brian Aldiss (Greybeard), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Barsoom series, Pellucidar series), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Fritz Leiber (The Wanderer), C.S. Lewis (Perelandra), and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World) are discussed along the way. The roles of various magazines in establishing the genre, an area of the author's special expertise, are fully examined (Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention, Amazing Stories, and Weird Tales, among others).

Science Fiction from Wells to Heinlein

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Stonehenge, the megalithic monument in southern England that dates in its Bronze Age phase to 2000 B.C. (but with a history stretching back yet another thousand years to Neolithic times), attracts more than a million tourists a year, but is much more than a visible array of great standing stones. The entire region includes a vast cemetery and a number of other sites that indicate the remains of sizeable wooden buildings. Stonehenge was indeed its own city, the metropolitan center of a powerful kingdom heretofore unsuspected. That city is reconstructed by the author from the archaeological evidence—royal palace, banquet hall and tomb, among other buildings. In passing, the author incisively demolishes the popular theory that Stonehenge served as a prehistoric astronomical observatory. He rather advances a political theory grounded in cultural continuities that carry forward into the early Iron Age, best documented in ancient Ireland. Here (apart from Homer) begins European literature, derived from oral traditions. The entire book is richly illustrated.

Stonehenge City: A Reconstruction

Describes the origins of the state cult of Confucius in China.

Imperial China and the State Cult of Confucius

Religion & Spirituality

Robert A. Heinlein (Twayne's United States Authors Series)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Twayne Pub

The shaving of Karl Marx: An instant novel of ideas, after the manner of Thomas Love Peacock, in which Lenin and H.G. Wells talk about the political meaning of the scientific romances

Chiron Press

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Books by Stover, Leon E.