Riassunto
Riassunto di La guerra nell’aria
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love early science fiction, sharp social comedy and stories about how wars begin, and anyone curious about how people once imagined air power.
Che cos’è questo libro
The War in the Air is a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1908. It was written only five years after the Wright brothers first flew, when airships and aeroplanes were new and nobody knew what they would do to the world. Wells, who had already written The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, asks a plain question. What happens when the oceans stop protecting nations, and bombs can fall from the sky on any city?
His answer comes through an unlikely hero. Bert Smallways is a cheerful, ill-educated young man who repairs bicycles in the south London suburb of Bun Hill. He is no soldier and no scientist. Through a string of accidents he is swept up in a balloon, then into the secret plans of great powers, and at last into a war that spreads over the whole planet. The book gives you comedy, adventure and some of the earliest scenes of air raids in fiction.
It also gives you a warning. Wells shows how ordinary people drift into disaster while the clever and the powerful boast of progress. Let us begin where Bert begins, in a shabby corner of Edwardian England, on the edge of a changing age.
In questo riassunto
- 1Bert Smallways lives in a small worldFree
- 2Dreams of flight stir the whole world
- 3A runaway balloon carries Bert off
- 4The Germans seize Bert and the secret
- 5The air fleet strikes at New York
- 6War spreads and Bert is caught in it
- 7Progress without wisdom brings ruin
- 8Bert stands for the common man
- 9A comic voice tells a dark story
Punto chiave 1 di 9
Bert Smallways lives in a small world
The story opens in Bun Hill, a growing suburb in Kent, in the early years of the twentieth century. Bert Smallways is the younger son of a family that has never risen above shabby respectability. His brother Tom is a stolid, grumbling man, and the family lives among cheap houses, noisy shops and tired ambitions. Wells describes the place with a mixture of affection and scorn, as a town that is growing fast without knowing why.
Bert himself is quick, talkative and restless. He leaves school with little learning but plenty of nerve. He becomes a bicycle mechanic, and later runs a small cycle business that never quite pays. He is also fond of the new fashions of the day, the cheap papers, the music halls and the talk of what machines will soon do for mankind.
Wells loves Bert, but he does not flatter him. Bert is not stupid, yet he has been given no training in how to think about the large forces around him. He reads headlines but not arguments. He cheers for the nation without asking what the nation is doing. This is exactly the sort of person, Wells suggests, on whom the fate of the century will fall.
There is a love story in the background. Bert courts a young woman named Edna, and rivals appear who are more settled and more prosperous than he is. Wells uses these small rivalries to show Bert's vanity and his decency together. He is easy to laugh at and easy to like.
So the book begins small on purpose. Before any airship rises, we are asked to look at the people below and ask what they know about the machines that will soon rule over them. The first answer is almost nothing, and that is the point.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about La guerra nell’aria
What is The War in the Air about?
It follows Bert Smallways, a bicycle mender from Kent, who is carried by accident into a war fought with airships and flying machines. Wells uses his adventures to show how air power could end the safety of islands and oceans.
When was The War in the Air written?
H. G. Wells published it in 1908, only a few years after the first powered aeroplane flights. It is a work of fiction, but it imagines air raids and the fall of old defences with surprising foresight.
Who is Bert Smallways?
Bert is the hero, a cheerful, quick-talking young man from Bun Hill with little education. He is not a soldier or scientist, which is why his view of the war feels so close to that of an ordinary person.
Is The War in the Air hard to read?
Not very. The language is clear and often funny. Readers used to Edwardian style will find it easy and lively.
What is the main message of The War in the Air?
Wells warns that machines are advancing faster than wisdom. Nations that cling to old pride and rivalry will use new weapons without understanding the cost, and ordinary people will be the ones who suffer.