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The War in the Air

And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted

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About this listen

The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted is a military science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells. The novel was written in four months in 1907, and was serialized and published in 1908 in The Pall Mall Magazine. It is (like many of Wells's works) notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts - particularly the use of aircraft for the purpose of warfare - as well as conceptualizing and anticipating events related to World War I. The novel's hero and main character is Bert Smallways, who is described as "a forward-thinking young man" and a "kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-'ave-a-look-at-it and enamel-chipping variety."

Public Domain (P)2022 Bookstream GmbH Classics Science Fiction War Military
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Wells’s prescience in predicting aerial warfare is matched only by the narrator’s incompetence in pronouncing everyday words.

The Pain in the Ear

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This audiobook from Bookstream Audiobooks, narrated by Raymond Haggart is, by quite a long way, the worst one I have ever purchased from Audible. It is entirely unfit for purpose and, after contacting Audible to complain, they took the title back. And this is all a great pity, because The War in the Air, published in 1908, is one of H G Wells’ more interesting and quirky productions. It has some fascinating predictions about developments in transport technology, most of which, unusually for Wells, were wrong. But it is a fascinating read, and that is why I am so irritated at this thoroughly shoddy audiobook.

A previous book by H G Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through, was also produced as an audiobook by Bookstream, also with really poor narration. Both audiobooks have a brief greeting in German at the beginning, and I believe that Bookstream is a German company. In both books the narrator—obviously a native English speaker—frequently mispronounces quite ordinary English words. What is so awful about Mr Haggart though, is that he makes no attempt at all at any characterisation, frequently takes a pause at entirely inappropriate points in the sentence, and his rendering of an English sentence in a German accent is absurd.

Audible really need to look to the screening of third-party vendors if they are to maintain their reputation as a reliable supplier of quality audiobooks.

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