书名：The War of the Worlds 星际战争/世界大战
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1040L
作者：H. G. Wells
出版社名称：William Collins
出版时间：2017
语种： 英文
ISBN：9780008190019
商品尺寸：11.1 x 1.5 x 17.8 cm
包装：简装
页数：240

The War of the Worlds《星际战争》又名《世界大战》，是英国科幻大师威尔斯的代表作。小说背景采用真实地点，并以第1人称口吻叙述，颇像一位大浩劫的幸存者讲述他的生命历险记，惊心动魄而又绘声绘色，给人以身临其境之感。
在这本书中威尔斯对火星人的外貌特征进行了直接描写，这也成了后来20世纪美国科幻小说“黄金时代”的一大特征。威尔斯在作品中首次意识到了火星人和地球人之间可能的文明冲突：星际之间的战争。这是一个何其广阔的“空间”，从此在科幻小说史上，人类和外星人之间一直烽火不断。

推荐理由：
1.世界科幻大师威尔斯代表作之一，内容完整无删减；
2. 史蒂芬·斯皮尔伯格执导、汤姆·克鲁斯主演电影《世界大战》英文原著；
3.柯林斯经典系列，含历史背景及作者介绍（Life & Times），后附英语词汇注释（Glossary of Classic Literature），生词表采用《柯林斯英语词典》的解释，有助于读者学习理解；
4.轻型环保纸印刷，小巧轻便，方便随身携带阅读。
“For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.”
When a strange, meteor-like object lands in the heart of England, the inhabitants of Earth find themselves victims of a terrible attack. A ruthless race of Martians, armed with heat rays and poisonous smoke, is intent on destroying everything that stands in its way. As the unnamed hero struggles to find his way across decimated wastelands, the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. . .
H. G. Wells was a pioneer of modern science fiction. First serialised in the UK in 1897,The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to depict conflict with an extraterrestrial race, and has influenced countless adaptations and sequels.
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.
Features:
·Life & Times—a fascinating insight into the author, their work and the time of publication
·Glossary of Classic Literature—useful words and phrases at your fingertips, taken from Collins English Dictionary
Review
“groundbreaking … a true classic that has pointed the way not just for science-fiction writers, but for how we as a civilisation might think of ourselves”—Guardian
“[Wells’ work is] astonishingly rich in human and historical interest… he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb”—David Lodge
“I personally consider the greatest of English living writers [to be] H. G. Wells”—Upton Sinclair

The War of the Worlds《星际战争》故事发生在大英帝国建立了庞大殖民地、称霸世界的19世纪末期。火星人从天而降，在伦敦附近着陆，拉开了征服地球战争的序幕。人类以机枪大炮面对火星人的先进武器——“热光”和“黑烟”。几十个火星人以雷霆万钧之势，所向披靡，在短短几天时间里就打得英国军队落花流水，致使政府、制度、社会土崩瓦解。然而。火星人尚未彻底征服地球，灭顶之灾就悄然向它们袭来。令人啼笑皆非的是，它们的克星竟是地球上卑微、渺小的生物——细菌。
When a strange, meteor-like object lands in the heart of England, the inhabitants of Earth find themselves victims of a terrible attack. A ruthless race of Martians, armed with heat rays and poisonous smoke, is intent on destroying everything that stands in its way. As the unnamed hero struggles to find his way across decimated wastelands, the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. . .

赫·乔·威尔斯（H. G. Wells）（1866-1946），英国小说家、社会学家、历史学家，他先在伦敦皇家学院师从赫胥黎学习生物学，后于1888年毕业于伦敦大学。1895年出版的科幻小说《时间机器》使他一举成名。他是继儒勒·凡尔纳之后杰出的科幻作家。代表作有《时间机器》《隐身人》《星际战争》等。
H. G. Wells was a prolific author and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. He is best remembered for his science fiction novels, and is considered a founding father of the genre. His most notable works includeThe Time Machine,The Island of Doctor Moreau,The Invisible Man andThe War of the Worlds. He died in 1946.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.