In the Days of the Comet (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By H.G. Wells

In this 1906 novel, a comet’s mysterious green fog causes a profound transformation of the world. William Leadford, a young Socialist student, seeks both improvements in labor conditions and revenge on the middle-class Nettie for spurning his love. On the evening he plans to kill Nettie, a comet enters the atmosphere and emits a sleep-inducing fog. William awakens to a new world in which he finds peace of mind, peace among nations, and no industrial pollution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411464766

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English novelist who helped to define modern science fiction. Wells came from humble beginnings with a working-class family. As a teen, he was a draper’s assistant before earning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science. It was there that he expanded his horizons learning different subjects like physics and biology. Wells spent his free time writing stories, which eventually led to his groundbreaking debut, The Time Machine. It was quickly followed by other successful works like The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds.

Reviews for In the Days of the Comet (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[randystafford · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My reaction to reading this novel in 1996. Spoiler follow.Essentially this is a long rant by Wells on the squalid, economically unjust, sexually irrational (to Wells that is) world of his England. I liked that part of the novel with it’s narrator ultimately setting out to murder his girlfriend and her upper class lover. The complaints of a poor, rather brash young man who has a litany of socialist based complaints was quite realistic and convincing. What was totally unconvincing was the changes wrought on human nature by the green gas of a comet. Changes wrought just in time to prevent the narrator from carrying out his murders. Wells returns to his theme of unconventional sexual and marital arrangements when the narrator enters into a menagé a trois (in the classic sense of the word) with his two intended victims. Here Wells’ World State (to borrow the term from his A Modern Utopia – it's called “The Change” here) is magically brought in by the comet. Evidently, between 1914 (the year The World Set Free was published and 1906, Wells decided “The Change” would have to be brought about violently.

[homeofharris · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not the Greatest Wells book, but seems to be the archetype of many 1950's sci-fi books and movies.

[tonynetone_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a Socialist, he tries to move power. Great Age begins anew, as the 80s amazing as much the world.In the Days of the Comet is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells in which humanity is "exalted" when a comet causes "the nitrogen of the air, the old azote to "change out of itself" and become "a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and brain.n the Days of the Comet is a HG Wells novel that employs the vapors of a comet to bring about a profound and lasting transformation in the attitudes and perspectives of humankind

[joe73-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This story was hard to like. The main character was a despicable fellow. He was self absorbed, full of hatred and was so full of self loathing and hatred of those around him that he could not function as a member of society...he knew this but yet was ok with it. The only thing he cared about was a stuck up socialite which eventually put him on the road to murder. Victorian/Edwardian Era Hippies and free love....this must have been scandalous at the time it was written. But the moral is there...I guess.

[dragonfreak · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

William “Willie” Leadford is a student in a British town called Clayton. He, like most people at that time, is a socialist and wants a change in power for the higher ranked class. Willie is stuck in this horrible circle of love where he loves Nettie, and one day Nettie is now married to an upper class gentleman, which breaks his heart. All the while, a mysterious green comet is coming closer and closer to the Earth, but it seems that the new war with Germany is much more important.On the night of the Change, Willie decides to kill Nettie, his husband, and then kill himself. That was his plan, until the comet crashes into Earth, changing everything…for the better. When Willie wakes, he feels happy and pure, and realized for the first time how horrible it was to kill his love. The comet changed everyone else too to this strange sense of relaxation and kindness. And as his adventure goes on, he contemplates on his life before the days of the comet.Despite how ideally interesting this book sounds, it’s really not that interesting. I’ve read [The Time Machine] by Wells and felt horribly disinterested in the book. The book is missing something. I can’t tell what, but there’s some sort of element that lacked in both books. But I can tell you, I’m probably not going to read anymore Wells books.Rating: Three Stars ***

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Despite its title and ostensible theme, this is only SF in the most superficial sense. It is a novel about alienation from contemporary life and about the desire for justice and vengeance against the perceived authors of that injustice. The narrator William Leadford's rejection of contemporary (turn of the 19th/20th century) capitalism is mixed with his rage and desire for vengeance after being rejected by his lover Nettie in favour of a local aristocrat. To add to the misery, towards the middle of the novel, war breaks out between Britain and Germany, mostly consisting of naval engagements in the North Sea, though there is a prescient reference to the "heaped slaughter of many thousands of men" (this novel was written in 1905). The comet's crash with Earth gives forth a green vapour that somehow changes the nitrogen in the atmosphere and increases human brainpower to the extent that everyone learns to love their fellow man and co-operate. In the pen of a less skilful writer, this idea could fail dismally but the change is brilliantly described in terms of being an almost religious redemption of the souls and minds of all humans, or perhaps in more modern words, a vast injection of a positive mental attitude that transforms everyone's outlook on the world and on each other. They then create a communist society (in the pure classical sense of being communitarian, not the Marxist sense). Clearly this reflects the author's desire for such a human transformation, but it is a sad commentary on human nature that it took such a cosmic catalyst for this change to take place. The mass burning at the end of pre-Change artifacts struck me as horrific, though.

[baswood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mystery, Utopia, science fiction, socialism, the human condition and a blistering attack on turn of the century society: Wells puts it all together in this overlooked gem from his extensive legacy of books. Perhaps it is his thinly shrouded advocacy for a socialist society with element of free love (the free love element caused a stink in 1906), that has ensured the novels relative obscurity, or perhaps it is his unrelenting critique of human nature which strikes too close to the bone, or perhaps people feel that they have heard all this before from the great man, whatever the reasons I think this now ranks as one of the best examples from his oeuvre and it is the mystery element that binds it together and makes it work.The prologue to the story establishes the mystery, the mystery of the narrator. It is written in the first person and describes how he arrives on some sort of assignment to a strange tower in which dwells a man furiously writing. The furniture is described as "new to me and in no fashion that I could name" the writer is using a "thing like a fountain pen" and our narrator is invited to read the tome whose pages are lying together as they have been written. Above the writer is a concave speculum through which can be seen a magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a terrace, a palace, the vista of a great roadway with many people exaggerated, but the actual window in the tower is too high to see directly through. The narrator asks repeatedly "what is this place? and where am I? The mystery of the person doing the writing is solved when the story gets underway, because it is his story and he is Willie Leadford. The narrator proceeds to read the tome and it is Willie Leadford's autobiography that makes up the bulk of Wells novel. Willie Leadford is a disaffected youth working in a pot-bank in a grimy midlands coal mining town. His friend Parload is an amateur stargazer who becomes affixed by the possibility of a new comet that is approaching earth. Willie has no time for the prattling stargazer he is much more interested in Nettie his fiancé of two years who lives 17 miles away and who he is assiduously courting. He becomes interested in socialism after hearing a public speaker with whom he establishes an acquaintance, but Willie's world is tumbling around his ears. He quits his job when his demand for a pay rise is refused, Nettie seems to be moving away from him and his poor mother is struggling to keep her head above water in their dingy rented house whose landlord refuses to carry out any repairs. Wells brilliantly paints a picture of the hopelessness of many aspects of working class life in those drear coal mining communities. We feel Willie's disaffection as Wells with a mixture of irony and satire describes the working mans situation: it was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others were all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they winked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling, wicked dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the faces of the poor" Willie's life gets more difficult when he gets involved in a demonstration at the local pit and discovers that Nettie is seeing another man and this man Verrall is a rich young man and friend of the mine owner. We follow Willie's journey from disaffected youth to a rampant class hatred of the wealthy and finally to would be murderer. It is important to Wells themes that the reader should not be in total sympathy for Willie, there is an ambiguity, a hatred a desperate side to his character that baulks the reader from being in total sympathy with him and all the while that comet is approaching earth. Things get even more desperate when war is declared between Britain and Germany and Wells adds this into the soup of the pressures and stresses that beat down the lives of the working men. Willie wants vengeance, but the reader is aware that a Change is coming and the comet now lights up the sky at night."Now, the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as that, it was worried and overworked and perplexed by problems that would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it was in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing, there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere but half truths, hasty assumptions, hallucinations and emotions. Nothing....."The comet passes close enough to earth so that it's green like vapour trail has an immediate affect on the people. At once everyone goes into a coma like state, but this only lasts for a few hours and people start to awaken and now they are filled with a sort of divine light. Not everyone wakes up of course because some were killed when they went into a coma, for example those driving motors, those working machinery etc. The survivors are filled with a desire to start afresh and this time they only have the good of the whole community in their hearts. Wells after some excellent description of a world awakening anew concentrates his story back with Willie and his desperate pursuit of Nettie and Verrall. Now everything has changed and the three of them work towards an accommodation of their feelings. It is the same the world over men and women have been enlightened, they have lost their muddle, their pettiness, they can only perceive the good things to be achieved. The change has not affected their personalities their wants and desires, but it has given everybody the tools and the environment in which they can work through their issues. A new government is formed on socialist principles and the concept of ownership has changed. This has been Willie Leadford's story and we are in no doubt that his story was re-enacted the world over, but now Wells provides us with an epilogue and at once the story is put into focus, but the mystery deepens. We know that Willie is an old man now writing his memoirs but what has happened to the world, and who is the narrator that now takes up the question that he has been itching to ask while reading Willie's autobiography. What happened between him and Nettie did they become lovers? That question is answered, but who is Willie, did the comets effects make them all into deities? Are they of the same world as the narrator. Read the book if you want to come to your own conclusions.It is a magnificent achievement by Wells to combine many of his favourite themes into a novel that also holds our interest with an intense personal story and some incisive writing about working class life. He also along the way predicted the coming war with Germany (still eight years in the future) and provides us with an idea of an Utopian world. The sting in the tail however is that Utopia cannot be achieved without some massive outside intervention that will change mans basic perception of his world. Perhaps after all this is why the book is not so highly regarded because it is ultimately depressing. Wells may have created the mystery in order to shield his thoughts on the human condition and also to hide his ideas on free love, but whatever that maybe it has provided an intoxicating read which I rate at 4 stars.