The Telegraph presents the best books from the science fiction and fantasy genres
Best sci-fi and fantasy novels of all time: (clockwise from top left): War of the Worlds by H G Wells; Margaret Atwood; Neil Gaiman; 1984 by George Orwell Photo: Penguin; Rex Features; Martin Pope; Penguin
Lewis Carroll (1865)
It has been suggested that Alice’s trippy experiences are Carroll’s comment on his contemporary mathematical theory: that all the growing and shrinking is about Euclidean geometry and that episodes such as the caterpillar and the hookah are a send-up of symbolic algebra. Whatever the explanation, it endures.
Does the county of Surrey make quite enough of the fact that Wells’s malevolent Martians first landed in Woking? Or that the hideous creatures in their tripods laid waste to Walton-on-Thames? Like all immortal science fiction, this is rooted in more earthly anxieties – here, belligerent European rival nations. For the rest link here.
