“No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own…” (243).
The quintessential apocalyptic first contact story, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds returns readers to the familiar setting of his friends and neighbors located in Woking, Surrey (the same setting as Wells’s previous work The Invisible Man) in an unfolding apocalyptic crisis as hostile Martians decide to flee from their dying planet and invade the British countryside, destroying nearly everything in sight. The War of the Worlds was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialized in Pearson’s Magazine (Cosmopolitan magazine in the United States). It was then collected into a full novel in 1898 by William Heinemann of Heinemann publishing (much like the path previously laid by Wells’s The Invisible Man).
Notably, Wells opens The War of the Worlds with an epigraph quoting Robert Burton and paraphrasing Johannes Kepler: “But who shall dwell in these Worlds if they be inhabited?… Are we or they Lords of the World?… And how are all things made for man?” (quoted from The Anatomy of Melancholy). It reminds us of just how long humanity has gazed up at the stars and wondered if sentient life exists out there –compare this with the current program called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (or SETI), a program which H.G. Wells would have, no doubt, found fascinating. Wells was a technocrat who had considerable faith in science and progress; he supported a form of a one-world government led by a small group of scientists and inventors in an effort to address the difficult moral dilemma facing the human species (with this conviction, he understandably drew the ire of George Orwell). Wells was a student of “Darwin’s Bulldog” T.H. Huxley, and as such, he viewed human evolution as chaotic and imperfect, taking place in a cold and empty universe that cares very little for human concerns, responding to humanity with nothing but unending silence. After all, where were the deities when the dinosaurs were wiped out? Humanity is hardly more prized than any other species, such as the bison or the dodo according to Wells. Despite dabbling in eugenics in his youth, Wells thought the one advantage humanity possesses is our capacity for reason, and that if we do not quickly learn to evolve and gain an advantage in order to survive, we might destroy ourselves. It is from this vantage point that Wells pens his greatest dystopian science fiction fantasy.
The War of the Worlds is a somewhat exhausting slow-build horror tale; the central theme of the book explores a critique of British colonialism and imperialism (particularly with respect to the British treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanians). Indeed, our anonymous philosophical narrator explicitly compares the sudden, violent Martian invasion to the monstrous cruelty of the British Empire –“And before we judge of them [the Martians] 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 own 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?” (244-245). With much of late Victorian England believing humanity sat atop the evolutionary hierarchy, and likewise that the British Empire had reached the apex of human civilization, H.G. Wells sought to interrogate those ideas by introducing another, far more advanced race, capable of total destruction with relative impunity –as if to ask, what then of human hubris?
In the novel, at some point in the late nineteenth century, a series of strange “missiles” begin to fire at earth from Mars (the planet that is the “star of war,” whose surface has begun its cooling process as it nears its planetary end of life). “A morning star of hope, our own warmer planet,” Mars is in the “last stage of exhaustion.” The little “missiles” turn out to be meteorites shaped like hot cylinders –ships– carrying terrifying Martian creatures, strange alien beings who have two luminous disc-like eyes on their huge, round heads, in addition to long, grey, snake-like tentacles (the narrator compares them to the mythological Gorgon). As our narrator observes these creatures from afar, he notes that the Martians seemingly never sleep, and have no sense of fatigue. Interestingly, they do not use the wheel (maybe they never discovered it) though they do possess superior technology. They are likewise not sexual beings but rather young Martians are simply spotted as attached to their parents before later budding off. Evolutionarily speaking, they have highly evolved brains and their hands appear to have morphed into tentacles over a long period of time (perhaps humanity and the Martians have evolved from a similar common ancestor). Additionally, the Martians bring with them a mysterious red weed, a native plant from Mars, which quickly starts spreading all over England.
“And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking-stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking-stool imagine it is a great body of machinery on a tripod stand” (281).
While the Martians struggle to adjust to earth’s gravity at first, they soon begin to find their footing and start to lay waste to the English countryside. Using three-legged tripod machine, a noxious black smoke, and a heat-ray device that instantly incinerates everything in its path, the Martians move through Woking, leaving a trail of absolute devastation — charred bodies and destroyed buildings. All the people flee in terror as destruction and death engulf the human race. Some people are rounded up for consumption by the Martians, while others like our unknown narrator manage to survive on their own among the rubble (desperate to reunite with his wife one day). Along the way, he meets a courageous artilleryman and also a raving lunatic of a curate who fears the Martian invasion represents “the day of the Lord” (thankfully, the narrator is forced to assassinate this obnoxious curate in a dramatic sequence that very nearly leads to the narrator’s death as a tentacled Martian slowly creeps through his hiding place). Half of Book One (“The Coming of the Martians”) is devoted to the narrator’s brother had been studying medicine in London when the Martians began destroying towns en route to London (Richmond, Kingston, Wimbledon and so on), each of them advancing in a line, perhaps a mile and a half apart, communicating with each other via siren-like howl. The Martians are further described as little brown figures in hoods who descend on mankind (humanity is akin to “eatable ants”). Panic and terror seize the crowds fleeing London as our narrator’s brother escapes to Essex –“Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together” (338).
By Book Two (“The Earth Under the Martians”) the narrator wonders if this is how millions of years of human evolution and civilizational progress will come to an end: “For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive” (380). In heavy exposition passages, Wells makes numerous references to English towns and geography, many of which are unknown and uninteresting to foreigners. However, maybe this is part of the point? Colonizing outsiders couldn’t possibly understand the rich, intricate details or the history of the land they are colonizing.
Just when things seem darkest, our narrator begins to wander through the ghostly, ashen streets of London only to find the whole city oddly still and quiet. Where are all the terrified people? Where are the invading Martians? Suddenly, he hears an echoing cry of “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” and he comes upon a downed Martian, wailing before it dies. He then finds fifty dead Martians in one of their pits:
“In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter-places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians –dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all men’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth… For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things –taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed a resisting-power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many –those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men nor die in vain” (401).
As it turns out, while the British military proved mostly ineffective against the superior Martian technology, the Martians actually were vulnerable to germs and bacteria. This unsettling ending is particularly horrifying because humanity is unable to save itself –instead, people are saved by pure dumb luck, tiny microbial forms of bacteria outshine all of human technology. The Martians simply lacked the necessary antibodies needed to prevent against earthly diseases and our narrator notes that they don’t even bury their dead, a fact which points to their ignorance of the putrefactive process. Their red weed starts to die and their black smoke vanishes. The darkness of night gives why to a new brightening day. In the end, the narrator is amazingly reunited with his wife and his cousin back home (it has been scarcely a month since the invasion began). However, speculation continues to grow about the Martians –apparently, they have colonized Venus and perhaps in the future they will attempt another invasion of earth. But for now, peace has returned.
“The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin” (403).
Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY (first published in 1898, included in Everyman’s Library in 1935, 2010 hardcover edition). It was dedicated to H.G. Wells’s brother, Frank Wells “this rendering of his idea.”
After all the adaptations from Orson Welles’ radio broadcast to the most recent movie version, it’s quite interesting to look back on the iconic sci-fi book that started it all. Thank you for your review.