paul.dellinger@roanoke.com (276) 228-4752

But for injuries suffered by an English lad more than a century ago, Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg would not have been in Virginia making a movie recently - at least not "War of the Worlds."

And I might not been a life-long science-fiction reader.

Herbert George Wells spent months as an 8-year-old recovering from a broken leg, during which time he learned to love the books his father and others brought to him each week. Later, in a student football game, another injury cut short his planned teaching career and he started writing his own books.

Science writer Joel Achenbach put it best: "H.G. Wells didn't invent the future - but he tried."

Wells is best remembered for his "scientific romances," stories that would later be termed "science fiction," like "The Time Machine," "The Invisible Man," "The First Men in the Moon" and "The War of the Worlds." Each hatched SF themes from which writers are still borrowing.

Nowhere is that more apparent than with "War" which, in 1898, started the alien invasion sub-genre. A 1938 radio play updated and moved the story from England to the United States, and thousands of listeners who tuned in late believed it was actually happening. I was unaware of all that, having been born only two months before, but would hear references to it growing up.

Maybe that's why I gravitated toward SF in comic books: Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman (yes, even Batman dabbled in time travel and made a trip to Mars back then), and why I finally decided to lay out a quarter for a paperback I'd been considering for weeks at the local newsstand.

"Invasion From Mars: Interplanetary Stories Selected by Orson Welles" boasted a cover with a rocket blazing past Earth, a "map" of Mars on the back, and stories by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Nelson Bond and others whose work I'd be enjoying for the rest of my life. But its centerpiece was the radio script of Welles' Mercury Theatre broadcast from a decade before.

Four years later, producer Paramount adapted Wells' story for a movie, moving it to California and changing the book's Martian war machines (which resembled the Imperial Walkers of George Lucas' "Star Wars" movies) to floating UFOs. I didn't wait for it to reach my town; a friend and I hopped a Greyhound to a bigger community an hour away, and saw it double-billed with Abbott and Costello doing "Jack and the Beanstalk."

Not only an SF blockbuster, but a fantasy, too. What more could we ask?

By then, I was well into collecting SF paperbacks, a practice which continues today and stresses my wife as the bookshelves grow. (If I'd kept my comic books instead, I'd be rich; who knew what would be collectible?)

Another quarter got me the original Wells novel, a paperback movie tie-in, and I found that Wells' story was really about the British treatment of the Tasmanians, putting the shoe on the other foot as the Martians treated humanity the same way.

Television got in on the act in 1988, with a series that took its cue from the 1953 movie and updated the story again. Ann Robinson, the heroine from the movie, even reprised her character in three episodes (and the preliminary cast lists her in the new movie as well).

I'd figured "Independence Day" was the remake of "War" with today's special effects. I don't see a role for Tom Cruise in Wells' novel, but there wasn't one for Ann Robinson, either, and that production turned out pretty well. So I'll be in the audience later this year when the new "War" comes out.

But I'll kind of miss Abbott and Costello.

Paul Dellinger has been a Roanoke Times reporter for 40 years, almost as long as he has been reading science fiction.