One biographer has called The War in the Air "an extraordinary concoction—as if H.G. had shaken up Kipps and The War of the Worlds and poured out a new story that would appeal both to those who liked his social comedies and those who had been impressed by his early fantasies of terror."Noman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 222. Beatrice Webb annoyed Wells by preferring The War in the Air to Tono-Bungay, which Wells regarded as his masterpiece.Michael Sherborne, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (Peter Owen, 2010), pp. 185–86.
