Quiet quitting H.G. Wells

Recently, while editing the prewar chapter of Home Fires Burning, I made the decision to cut a few hundred words dealing with H.G. Wells’ ideas about aerial bombardment. And I feel good about it! Why is that? I’m not a Wells scholar by any means, but in the past I have had to engage with several of his works, mainly in terms of their influence on ideas about a knock-out blow from the air, in which bombers would destroy cities at the outbreak of a war and cause a near-instant collapse of a nation’s will to fight: most importantly The World Set Free (1914), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and, above all, The War in the Air (1908), which would have to be the best-known and most influential pre-1914 novel predicting aerial bombardment. Indeed, the title of my first book, The Next War in the Air, was partly a nod to The War in the Air. And you can see why: As the airships sailed along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below, they left ruins…