Some thoughts on H.G. Wells's 'War of the Worlds' (1989)
Not just a scifi classic, also a horror tale and a protest against colonisation among other things...
And before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (Wells, War of the Worlds)
(Spoiler warning for both ‘the War of the Worlds’ and ‘The Time Machine by H.G. Wells)
During the summer I always re-read some older books. One of them this year was one that I have had lying around for a while, and which is not too long: ‘the War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells, in a Dutch translation to be precise. (find it here in various formats in English on project Gutenberg for free) For those who haven’t heard of the book, it’s an especially influential Sci-Fi story published just before the end of the nineteenth century (1898), which was in many ways a first for many elements that would later become commonplace.
The Englishman H.G. Well, together with the Frenchman Jules Verne, is often seen as the beginning of modern science fiction. But where Verne is best known for his predictions of later technology (in '20,000 Leagues under the Sea' (1870), for example, he predicts not only submarines, but also the possibilities of electricity and photography), Wells is best known for introducing completely new concepts such as alien invasions, time machines (in a book named, well, you guessed it, 'the time machine'), and even speculative biology and ecology, with attention to the details of the dystopian consequences of his worldbuilding.
In his most famous book the War of the Worlds he took the then well-known and popular genre of invasion literature, but instead of, for example, a German invasion of England, he had technologically and intellectually much more advanced aliens invade his motherland in a way that goes far beyond the wars of his time. It is a story that frightened people in its day, and still had that effect much later when a 1938 American radio play version, with an updated storyline moved to New Jersey, caused widespread panic because many people did not realize it was fiction and thought they were really being attacked by Martians.
A story with such an impact is not as simple as a writer to create, and requires quite a bit of attention to detail. The worldbuilding, as we would call it today, is still interesting, and dare I say very impressive for its time. It is clear that Wells draws on biology and Darwinian ideas of natural selection,, at a time when Martians in fiction were often seen simply as humans. But Wells's Martians are indeed completely alien; they are completely different from us and have nothing human and represent a completely different world: basically they consist of enormous heads with a set of tentacles, with a strange physiology, and a technology that is very much ahead of ours with enormous 'mecha' machines that can fight, work, and even fly, yet they have the wheel and even apparently the pivot was not invented. The way in which they are completely different is well developed in the book, and sometimes frighteningly convincing.
In addition to the intended distance there is one more unintended layer of distance, at least for me reading the book in Flanders in 2024, and the England of 'the early twentieth century' (the story was set a little bit in the future) is also a completely different setting than I am used to. The writer mentions many places in England that are probably familiar to the English reader, but for a Flemish person they are all just exotic words that could just as easily be fantasy names. But especially the world of England itself before the world wars is really a different world, with different technology, customs, logic and things that are taken for granted that aren’t anymore.
The writing style of the book then; it wil probably be old-fashioned to some, with lots of long sentences and archaisms in the vocabulary. But personally, to be honest, I like it like that. What is also interesting about the style is the use of a first-person reporting style by an unnamed narrator (his wife's name is also not revealed), which in some areas gives a narrator that doesn’t know everything himself either, who in other places adds commentary that comes after the events. There are also a number of chapters in third person from the point of view of his brother, leaving London, which he must have spoken after the events, but this is not specified. In itself, that mix of omniscient and at the same time uncertain or even ignorant narrator in first person is quite interesting to read. Probably not the style encouraged in today's 'creative writing' courses, but perhaps even more interesting than what those courses will yield anyway...
Another comment can be made about the genre: at the time, as mentioned earlier, it was also seen as a very unusual example of invasion literature like I said, while now it is mainly regarded as an important science-fiction classic from a pioneer. But it could just as easily be seen as an example of atypical horror, perhaps even more so than that other sci-fi classic Frankenstein, which is often uncritically classified as horror. We get monsters here that almost resemble Lovecraft (who was just a child at the time of this book's publication) and his infamous 'eldritch abominations': completely unearthly creatures outside any reference system that depopulate entire regions with unknown weapons, consisting of a head with enormous eyes and especially tentacles, a brutal story with endless deaths by gruesome unknown weapons, and no hope from a certain point on in a world that goes completely crazy... Ultimately, the plan is not only conquest, but also a kind of Terraforming (Martiforming?) of our world with invasive Martian plants, which initially completely overwhelm our ecosystems and slowly make our world itself alien, which is a very Lovecraftian theme I’d sat. And in a more conventional horror vein there is also the detail that in the end it turns out that the Martians are a sort of vampires, who literally just drain blood from their victims instead of feeding on food (their bodies have no digestive system) and prefer to use humans for this, who evidently don’t survive this, which in the story is yet another horrific revelation among many.
Despite elements of other genres, of course there are also plenty of reasons to call this a milestone in science fiction, such as the strong biological and sociological speculation, and the Martians' mecha machines that have 3 or 5 legs and are vastly ahead of human technology.
Moreover, there are also uncanny predictions, reminiscent of the way Jules Verne predicted the technology of the future in his stories, for example in how the Martian way of waging warfare foreshadows our own human wars of the twentieth century. Firstly, there is the idea of total warfare in which entire regions are wiped out and massacred, which was unknown in Europe until the World Wars, but certainly became a reality, especially in the Second World War. And secondly the aliens' two main weapons also resemble later human weapons of mass murder: the black smoke is clearly a form of poison gas, and the terrible heat ray has an echo not only in later monstrous weapons like Napalm, but especially in what happened to the also completely unprepared victims of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who simply evaporated near the impact.
Note that Wells points out that although 'human technology has advanced greatly' through the exploration of the work machines, the heat wave cannot be recreated by humans (attempts are made to analyze it, which lead to casualties, and then the research is stopped) and the black smoke has also disappeared. Wells is clear that the only thing humans should learn from the Martian is neutral technology, not their weapons of mass destruction...
And here we have to say something about the obvious double meaning of the story: of course it was not primarily intended to warn of new monstrosities of human war in the coming century, since it is the colonizing Martians who use them and who swee away the unsuspecting English like mere ants. That's a comparison made several times in the book, as if the Martians are on a much higher level than humans, and we are just insects compared to them. And behind that comparison, there is another inspiration behind the story, and one that is also explicitly mentioned, which is the destructive colonization by the English, his own people, of large parts of the world in the previous centuries. Specifically the extermination of the Tasmanian aborigines is used by the author as a comparison, and it is clear where he is going with the story: What if modern colonial man encounters a more powerful opponent who does the same to him, can we even blame that opponent? In certain places the narrator even seems to excuse the Martians with the same colonial logic that must have sounded very logical to his contemporaries, but led to terrible abuses and injustice…
And even then it’s also a good story, and it remains a story with depth, in which the Martians are not just Lovecraftian abominations in the one-dimensional horror war. They have their own story and reasons, and also their own tragedy: Their world is older and almost extinct, and they are looking for a new world to survive as a species. This is of course a story usually told about humanity, but Wells applies it here to the Martians, unearthly and gruesome as they are.
It’s also clear that Wells has a sense for prophetic dystopias that is almost on par with George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, which is briefly evident in the book, when the artilleryman who, together with the main character, has survived a number of terrible things, shares his image of the future. That future depicted is one of humans as puny slaves (and food source, or at least supply of fresh blood to live on) of the Martians with an underground resistance bent on overcoming them one day, but with very Nietzschean characteristics and a social Darwinism between the weak who are cattle for slaughter and the strong who ultimately fight back. This described situation, by the way, is in a way very similar to the situation in Wells' other groundbreaking sci-fi, the Time Machine, in which the time traveller (also unnamed, like the hero the War of the Worlds) goes to a far future to find out that humanity has evolved into two species. At first sight there’s the lovely and naive Eloi, descendants of rich people with lots of luxury, who in the big reveal are actually just cattle for slaughter for the monstrous underground Morlocks descended from the miserable workers. But this future does not materialize in the War of the Worlds, and the nameless protagonist ultimately leaves his dreaming companion drunk, frightened by his plans and prediction, which are all premature: the Martians are felled by earthly germs and that which the humans fail to do is solved by nature.
That too of course has a parallel in our own history. Most people today will probably think mainly of how many indigenous peoples of the New World died from diseases from the Old World after colonization, but in earlier centuries there were also parts of Africa where Europeans could not survive for very long due to certain endemic diseases.
But for the deus-ex-machina plot-twist there is a scientific naivete in the worldbuilding that also occurs in the Time Machine. It is an idea that is now completely outdated, but which, for example, is also reflected in some of the transhumanist characters in C.S. Lewis’ Hideous strength (although they predict more and worse than that): the complete eradication of all bacteria and all diseases that come with them, but also stopping all rotting processes. Both on Mars in the War of the Worlds and in the dystopian future of the Eloi and Morlocks, this is a fait accompli, and because the life forms on Mars therefore have no immune system, they irrevocably fall prey to our microorganisms.
And so victory over the stronger enemy is not even a merit of man himself, because humanity alone, with all its civilization and technology and rationality and everything, compared to the Martians, is just like an ant's nest is to us. I have rarely come across a greater way of putting modern humanism in such a bleak perspective, but a little disillusionment with our human hubris every now and then is certainly permitted, isn’t it?
All in all, an interesting rereading of a book whose influence on contemporary books (and films) in various genres cannot be underestimated. The impact on the original audience must have been very different, but it remains a must-read for fans of speculative literature.
Anyone who noticed other things in the book?
Greetings
Bram
(I won't ask whether the main character of The Time Machine, by merely being present, has not brought back enough bacteria himself to wipe out both the Eloi and the Morlocks and collapse the entire ecosystem?)