Reviews for Travelling Companions

The average rating for Travelling Companions based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-14 00:00:00 Jesse Ouellette I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did maybe because even though I've heard a lot about this author it was my first time reading him. I like how fantasy and sci-fi are well represented in these short delightful stories. My favorites were: The Star which is hard to talk of without giving the punch of it so I won't explain it. A Dream of Armageddon about a man who has a complete life in his dreams. The Country of the Blind about a seeing man in a country ruled by the blind. I was very surprised about this one, I think it proves how H.G. Wells was a visionary; it reminds me a lot about our society's not always accepting people's difference or seeing something as an handicap when really it is a way of life (maybe an imposed one, but still a way of life).

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-26 00:00:00 Betty Aberlin It's remarkable how a skilled writer like H.G. Wells can write fiction that resonates with readers a century later. This collection is a little gloomy in its view of humanity; one recurring theme is how preferable it is to die than it is to live in a way that restricts liberty. About half the stories of the collection embrace this theme. Most of the collection merited four stars, but one story, the hardest to read of the collection, dropped it down to three. The collection deals with Armageddon, natural disasters, murder and other travesties, but the most horrifying of the collection is "Lord of the Dynamos"'a terrifying reminder of the rationalization widespread in Western society that attempted to excuse the enslavement of whole populations of people. Ideas expressed in this story fall right in line with writings from the likes of Karl Vogt and Samuel Morton, casually dropping references to racially-based intellectual inferiority, a tendency toward instinct over reason in Africans, and even racially correlated brain sizes. By far the scariest part of this collection, this story serves as a glaring and frightening reminder that very few among H.G. Wells' turn-of-the-century audience would have batted an eyelash at these ideas, which were used to defend historical horrors ranging from the trans-Atlantic slave nearly a century earlier to the Nazi eugenics program just a couple of decades into the future.