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Be Careful What War of the Worlds You Wish For

Well, there I was just a few days ago lamenting the fact that Spielberg chose to “adapt” Wells’ The War of the Worlds to the 21st century, and that he’d not done a period piece. And then I found a link on White Screen of Despair to a period production of the film (take your pick of trailer here).

Uh, it’s even more unfortunate than the Spielberg version, sad to say.

But on the bright side, one of the many books I brought back with me during my travels was a hardcover edition of Kevin J. Anderson’s 1996 anthology War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, which has short stories from a host of SF authors ranging from Connie Willis and Greg Benford to Janet Berliner and Mike Resnick. The idea of the book is that it has eyewiteness accounts of the alien invasion from the original Welles novel, as written by other famous people of the period (or, in some cases, people who were to become famous later). The Dowager Empress of China, Emily Dickinson, H. P. Lovecraft, Dwight Eisenhower, Pablo Picasso, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Henry James… the list goes on. I’m about halfway through it and having a ball. In fact, I think I’m off to enjoy it now. I’ll probably be posting a review of it in a day or two.

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