War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination

by Howard Bruce Franklin

Book Overview

Shortly after H.G. Wells published War of the Worlds, in which Martians decimate humanity, an American author countered with a buoyantly optimistic sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars--the great Thomas Edison invents a disintegrator beam which exterminates the aliens and unifies Earth behind America. This may seem a harmless fantasy, but as H. Bruce Franklin points out in War Stars, an eye-opening analysis of the superweapon in American culture, Edison's...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195052951
• ISBN13: 9780195052954
• Release Date: October 1988
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Level 1........

You know the feeling you get from a book that gets better and more interesting as you read it. This is one of those books. He is a very good writer. I listened to a Chomsky talk/interview who recommended the book. I thought SciFi was crap. But he showed it to be a kind of wonderful window of our thoughts, fears and hopes for the far or not so far future. Example after example of superweapons from 1798 - 1980's that were touted as the final weapon that would make war obsolete are exposed as fantasy. Now we face weapons that if used will make us obsolete. I must read......