From the back cover:
“The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky From Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common near London. At first, naive locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag — only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat-ray as terrifying tentacles invaders emerge. Soon the whole human race is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path with black gas and burning rays, and feast on the warm blood of trapped, still-living human prey. The forces of the Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they at first appear.

The first modern tale of alien invasion, The War of the Worlds remains one of the most influential of all science-fiction works.”

My thoughts:
These days, we’re used to the ‘disaster flick’—especially with today’s CGI capabilities—there seems to be one coming out every six weeks or so. Earthquakes, asteroid strikes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, unfortunate planetary alignments, rapid climate change, and of course (the standby favourite) alien invasion.

Reading this book takes us back in time (ironically enough) to a time when such a notion was completely, utterly novel. Suddenly we’re back in the 19th century, when space exploration was limited to weak (by modern standards) ground-based telescopes, when geographical features on the surface of Mars might have been, according to the speculation of some, grand canals built by an advanced civilisation, when humans had no technology that could come close to matching that of a space-faring species. No nuclear weapons, no plastic explosives or automatic weapons, no computers, no space shuttles or airplanes or helicopters—hell, not even telephones or automobiles.

To this world comes the Martians: intelligent, but so intelligent that we are as livestock to them. No diplomacy possible here. Just slaughter or failure to notice. And our narrator takes us through every moment from first contact to the final conclusion. There is no appeal to Hollywood heroes or human spirit. We, as a species are utterly helpless and our doom seemingly sealed. At one point the narrator speaks to a soldier who cooks up a possible plan for mere survival as a feral subgroup of a domesticated animal, that might if it’s lucky find a way to strike back in the distant future, but this is dismissed as sheer blind optimism. I won’t say how this is resolved, only that Wells doesn’t leave us hanging in the midst of a dystopian future.

There are layers of meaning here in this short novel, even more so than when it was first written I’m sure. Now that it is we who are destroying our planet, and we who travel to other planets. Excellent book and well worth reading!

Now, ordinarily I’d be doing this over at the BCReadalong blog (I see I haven’t actually utilised that venue in over a year!), but I’ve decided that I want to invite people from places other than just BookCrossing to join me (the discussion threads will still be on the Book Talk Forum over at Bookcrossing.com).

So what is this all about?
Well, Charles Darwin’s masterpiece, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. I thought this provided a perfect opportunity to read it, and what better way than to do it with company? So I’m setting up a “readalong” and inviting anyone who sees this to read On the Origin of Species along with me, and to come by BookCrossing to participate in (optional) weekly discussions. (I’ll be posting links to the appropriate threads on the BookCrossing Book Talk forum as soon as they’re created.) The schedule for the Readalong can be found below. I hope you’ll find it a reasonable pace (I’m finding it a bit hard to judge since my copy has a lot of pictures and materials from other sources). Don’t worry if you fall behind; previous threads will remain active. Remember: this is for fun, not for school.

The Book

From a publisher:
“’A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die…’. Darwin’s theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task. Yet The Origin of the Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and - by implication - within the human world. Written for the general reader, in a style which combines the rigour of science with the subtlety of literature, The Origin of the Species remains one of the founding documents of the modern age.”

The Schedule
Week 1: October 4, Introduction, Chapter 1
Week 2: October 11, Chapters 2-3
Week 3: October 18, Chapter 4
Week 4: October 25, Chapters 5-6
Week 5: November 1, Chapter 7
Week 6: November 8, Chapters 8-9
**note: The reading for Week 7 was moved ahead one week, to allow participants to catch up**
Week 7: November 22, Chapters 10-11
Week 8: November 29, Chapter 12
Week 9: December 6, Chapter 13
Week 10: December 13, Chapter 14

The Participants
Ibis3
Vekiki
FeistyPom2Love
grooble
swan-scot
Dunzy
Londonlife
miketroll
AZquark
geishabird
Cee-Blue

The Resources
Please let me know if you’d like me to add something here!
Dialogues With Darwin exhibit
Intelligent Design on Trial (a PBS doc on the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial)

The Vid
If you rate it, it’s more likely to come up in searches.

Book Alpha
3. The successive recognition by earlier philosophers of the material, efficient, and final causes

Notes:

• recap of the four types of causes: material (of what a thing consists), formal (how a thing results from patterns or laws), efficient (the agent of change), and final (to what end)
• earliest philosophers focused on material causes, trying to figure out what the basis of the existence of things is (i.e. what is the cosmos made of?)
• different philosophers saw different “elements” as primary (e.g. water, air, fire, four principal elements, infinite elements)
• from material causes, speculation grew respecting the efficient cause of the cosmos—why do things come to be and be destroyed?
• some proposed a single unchanged actor (Nature) that was the efficient cause of change
• though some thought change was random, that idea was considered by others as unseemly

From the publisher:
“First published in 1895, America’’s greatest novel of the Civil War was written before 21-year-old Stephen Crane had “smelled even the powder of a sham battle.” But this powerful psychological study of a young soldier’’s struggle with the horrors, both within and without, that war strikes the reader with its undeniable realism and with its masterful descriptions of the moment-by-moment riot of emotions felt by me under fire. Ernest Hemingway called the novel an American classic, and Crane’’s genius is as much apparent in his sharp, colourful prose as in his ironic portrayal of an episode of war so intense, so immediate, so real that the terror of battle becomes our own … in a masterpiece so unique that many believe modern American fiction began with Stephen Crane.

The Red Badge Of Courage has long been considered the first great ‘modern’ novel of war by an American–the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism.”

My thoughts:
I didn’t know what to expect when I started this book. I knew it was a nineteenth century American novel about a soldier, but aside from that I had no knowledge. The writing itself was very good, but the entire novel was really one long description, so it was more than a tad dull. On the other hand, the description was quite accurate, I could tell & I couldn’t help but compare Henry’s experience to those related in recent read, Fifteen Days. Also brought back memories of my time in basic training. I enjoyed the essay that ended the book, putting the events in their ironic context.