A Wellsian Classic Edited

ELT 37:4 1994 Land, and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Ruddick finds that in Ballard society's ambivalence about catastrophe is brought closer to the surface. Ballard goes beyond Wells in suggesting there is no single answer to the question about the nature of catastrophe. Ruddick's central thesis is not easily comprehended, partly because of its complexity underlying a surface simplicity, but partly (I am afraid) because of the multitude of examples that he cites along the way that lies outside the literature on which he is focused. Some of this ought to have been relegated to his explanatory footnotes. There are too many trees in this forest. But in the long run it is worth cutting through those trees to examine his view of British science fiction. It even makes the reader interested enough to go back to the primary sources and read the texts (even the despised Wyndham) to test the thesis. J. Randolph Cox Rolvaag Memorial Library Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota A Wellsian Classic Edited David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld, eds. A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: H. G. Wells's Scientific Romance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. xii + 319 pp. $35.00 ALTHOUGH WELLS'S FICTION is frequently taught in university courses, it has never received the kind of attention that has suggested that we ought to undertake the task of establishing definitive versions of his work. This undeclared assumption has now been implicitly challenged by a critical edition of one of Wells's earliest and still most popular romances. And the good news is that the example set by the two editors of this edition certainly provides a firm foundation for any future efforts of similar kind concerning other Wellsian classics. The editors' introduction describes the history of Wells's composition of War of the Worlds, delineates the contextual background and thematic foreground of the work, and furnishes an even-handed account of contemporary and latter-day responses to it. Both this introduction and the full, useful notes to the edition itself make available a digest of critical commentary, a digest so well managed that one may recommend it to a student, say, with complete confidence. There are appendixes as well, including a consideration of the transcript and collation of the manuscript preserved at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Especially interesting is Hughes's reprinted account of the unauthor574 BOOK REVIEWS ized and disconcertingly altered serializations of Wells's romance in yellow-press presentations in the New York Evening Journal and the Boston Post. These two versions and other printings of War of the Worlds included sensational illustrations, and it is a missed opportunity that only the cover of Amazing Stories is reproduced by Hughes and Geduld. These contemporary "mirrors" would have been, for me at least, far more valuable than the collaged photographs of later phonograph-record jacket illustrations and of later book-cover illustrations for sundry other fictional publications on Mars, including spin-offs of Wells's novel. And the full-page, and by now well-known, photograph of Orson Wells seemed to me only to highlight the degree to which the editors missed a true enhancement of their edition. Instead of these irrelevant selections , the original, now out-of-copyright illustrations would have been much more pertinent to the editors' task of presenting Wells's text, especially given their dedication elsewhere to establishing its intellectual and cultural milieu. These original illustrations record how the book was seen in its time—for such depiction is always also an act of interpretation as well as a precondition of the reader's experience of the text—and so these signifying 'Representations" preserve something of the cultural mood of the book's earliest readers. Providing for the disclosure of this mood would be a fine touch in any critical edition. For me, the other related disappointment with this production emerged after reading Geduld's essay on radio and film adaptations of War of the Worlds. Only at its conclusion, when it briefly indicates the use of Wells's romance in the Cold War "representation" of the Martians as Russian communists, does this article have a...