The War of the Worlds
| The War of the Worlds | |
 Illustration by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Correa from a 1906 Belgian edition. |
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| Author | Herbert George Wells |
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| Country |  United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | William Heinemann |
| Publication date | 1898 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) & E-book |
| Pages | 303 pp (May change depending on the publisher and the size of the text) |
| ISBN | N/A |
The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novel which describes an invasion of Earth by aliens from Mars. It is one of the earliest and best-known depictions of an alien invasion of Earth, and has influenced many others, as well as spawning several films, radio dramas, comic book adaptations, and a television series based on the story. The 1938 radio broadcast caused public outcry against the episode, as many listeners believed that an actual Martian invasion was in progress, a notable example of mass hysteria.
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Plot summary
The story is set "early in the twentieth century" and begins with the unnamed narrator, a writer of speculative scientific articles, visiting an observatory in Ottershaw on the invitation of a "well-known astronomer" named Ogilvy. There he witnesses an explosion on the surface of the planet Mars, one of a series of such events that arouses much interest in the scientific community. An unspecified time later, a "meteor" is seen landing on Horsell Common, near London. The narrator's home is close by, and he is among the first to discover the object is a space-going artificial cylinder launched from Mars. The cylinder opens, disgorging the Martians: bulky, tentacled creatures that begin setting up strange machinery in the cylinder's impact crater. A human deputation moves towards the crater and is incinerated by an invisible ray of heat projected from a Martian weapon.
After the attack, the narrator takes his wife to Leatherhead to stay with relatives until the Martians are killed; upon returning home, he sees firsthand what the Martians have been assembling: towering three-legged "fighting-machines" armed with the Heat-Ray and a chemical weapon: "the black smoke". The tripods smash through the army units now positioned around the crater and attack the surrounding communities. The narrator meets a retreating artilleryman, who tells him that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, cutting the narrator off from his wife. The two men try to escape together, but are separated during a Martian attack on Shepperton.
More cylinders land across the English countryside and a frantic mass evacuation of London begins; among the fleeing swarms of humanity is the narrator's brother, who is thrown together with the wife and the younger sister of a man named Elphinstone. These three eventually gain passage on a ship, crossing the English Channel to safety. One of the tripods is destroyed in the Shepperton battle by an artillery barrage and two more are brought down in Tillingham Bay by the torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child before the vessel is sunk; but soon all organized resistance has been beaten down, the Martian-imported red weed runs riot across the landscape, and the Martian war-machines hold sway over much of southern England.
The narrator becomes trapped in a half-destroyed building overlooking the crater of one of the later Martian landing sites. He covertly witnesses the Martians close at hand, including their use of captured humans as a food supply through the direct transfusion of their blood. He hides together with a curate who has been traumatized by the attacks and is therefore behaving erratically. Eventually the curate starts loudly proclaiming his repentance. Terrified that they will be heard, the narrator knocks the curate unconscious, but the man's body is discovered by the Martians and dragged away. The narrator barely avoids the same fate, and the Martians eventually abandon their encampment. The narrator then travels into a deserted London where he discovers that both the red weed and the Martians themselves have abruptly succumbed to terrestrial pathogenic bacteria, to which they have no immunity. The narrator is unexpectedly reunited with his wife, and they, along with the rest of humanity, set out to face the new and expanded view of the universe which the invasion has impressed upon them.
Relation to invasion literature
Researchers have noted the connection between Wells' book and the sub-genre known as "invasion literature" which was very common in the West - and particularly in Britain - in the decades before the First World War, and which reflected the increasing feeling of anxiety and insecurity as international tensions escalated towards the coming war.
Most such books had plots concerned with human armies invading each other's country, with British books mostly depicting German and/or French invading armies on British soil. Still, there were noted many plot similarities between Wells' book and The Battle of Dorking (1871) by George Tomkyns Chesney: in both books, a ruthless enemy makes a devastating surprise attack, with the British armed forces helpless to stop its relentless advance; and both works contain many passages written in the author's own voice which seem designed to try and shake Britons out of the complacent self-satisfaction of the Victorian age.
There are also similarities between Wells' book and the widely successful The Great War in England in 1897 published four years earlier (1894) by William Le Queux, where an invading French army penetrates to the heart of London - though Le Queux's book is written in a spirit of jingoistic nationalism opposite to Wells' tone.
Scientific predictions and accuracy
In 1878, Italian astronomer, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910) observed natural features on Mars and called them canali (Italian for "channels"); this was mistranslated into the English "canals" (artificial rivers), fuelling the belief that there was some sort of intelligent extraterrestrial life on the planet.
Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they had little knowledge of space travel, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.
Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells' concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations. It is notable the high level of science-fiction abstraction in Wells' description of Martian automotive technology: in the book the author stresses how the whole gamut of the Martian machinery does without revolving wheels, instead using the "muscle-like" contractions of metal discs along an axis to produce movement. Wells also presented a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads".[1][2]
On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.[3]
Interpretations
H.G. Wells was a strong supporter of the theory of evolution, and saw every species as being engaged in a constant, and often brutal struggle for survival. In the book, the Martian/mankind conflict is portrayed as a similar struggle, but on a larger scale. The book explores the morality inherent in social Darwinism, an ideology of some prominence at the time.
The science fiction author Isaac Asimov argued that the book was intended as an indictment of European colonial actions in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas. In the mindset of the time, European technological superiority was seen as evidence of all-round superiority, and thus Europeans were more qualified to administer colonized regions than their native inhabitants. The novel challenges this perspective by conflating the justness of the Martian invasion with the colonial invasions made by European powers. Wells himself introduces this theme in the novel's first chapter:
And before we judge 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?
—Chapter I, "The Eve of the War"
Animal rights activist David McKnight, writing in the November 2004 issue of Human and Animal Rights, noted that at least five vegetarians and animal rights activists known to him were substantially influenced to take their stance by reading Wells's book, which vividly conveys human beings' horror at becoming in effect the Martians' food animals.
Influence
The theme of alien invasion has remained popular ever since the story's initial publication, some modern examples being Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the "Worldwar" series by Harry Turtledove, and the film Independence Day. Tim Burton's farcical Mars Attacks! shares many themes with The War of the Worlds, particularly the unexpected and inglorious demise of the Martian invaders.
The idea of mecha also originated in The War of the Worlds. The AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back were roughly based on the idea of walking war machines. Tripod-like machines called Striders employed by the Combine from the computer game Half Life 2 along with other themes bear striking resemblance to those mentioned in the book. The Sentinels from the Matrix trilogy are also machines with many tentacles, and are seen grabbing humans (though only to throw them to their deaths) during the siege of Zion as shown in The Matrix Revolutions. Powered armour as popularised in Starship Troopers can also be traced back to The War of the Worlds; indeed, Heinlein's novel can be seen as a response to Wells'.
The War of the Worlds presents a hypothetical scenario of how humans may defeat the Martians in the speculations of a lone artilleryman encountered by the hero, who imagines a world where humanity, recognising that it cannot win through direct conflict, commences a guerrilla war. The Martians would rule Earth for generations to come; most humans (especially the "soft" middle classes towards whom complete contempt is shown) would soon get used to being domestic animals, whereas a nucleus of daring humans would hide out in tunnels and sewers, and would have about the same place in the Martian-dominated ecology as rats in the previous human ecology. After the passage of generations, these defiant humans would learn to duplicate the Martian weapons and destroy the invaders. The artilleryman's ambition is eventually exposed as nothing more than one man's delusion of grandeur (see megalomania) — he has no means to set about the project, and shows a complete lack of determination to complete even the simple and short-term goals that would set the rest of his plans in motion. A number of authors have, however, followed on from that theme.
The Tripods is a sci-fi trilogy for young adults written between 1967 and 1968 by John Christopher. It depicts the Earth after it has been overcome by aliens in three-legged machines. Humanity has been enslaved, and the books focus on the struggle by some teenagers to join the last free members of humanity in their cave refuges in the mountains. John Christopher admitted (in a BBC documentary called The Cult of the Tripods) that the alien war machines were inspired, at least subconsciously, by The War of the Worlds. The same concept was in fact used in the computer game Half-Life 2: the direct confrontation with the incoming invaders (the Combine) was a striking failure, (the war in fact is only 7 hours long); after their rule is established humans gradually regain control using weapons, tactics and technology of the invaders, in particular when their regain they morale in the messianic figure of the Anticitizen One, Gordon Freeman, that soon becames the leader of the guerrillas.
Along with Christopher's Tripods, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth and the 1980s television miniseries and series V are other notable examples where the story starts sometime after a successful alien invasion of Earth; instead focusing on the determination of a few humans using guerrilla tactics to defeat the alien occupation and the obstacles they must face both from the aliens and fellow humans alike. In such stories, the aliens tend to get far more character development than the faceless monsters originally depicted in the Wells novel. This allows room for subplots told on both sides.
Adaptations
The War of the Worlds has been adapted numerous times for radio, film, TV, and video games. Often the particular adaptation will change the setting to the current time and the place to where the adaptation is made.
- Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation
- War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, Santiago (1944)
- War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, Radio Quito, Quito, Ecuador (1949)
- The War of the Worlds, 1950 BBC radio dramatisation
- The 1953 film, produced by George Pál
- The War of the Worlds, 1967 BBC radio dramatisation
- 1968 WKBW radio adaptation
- Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical adaptation
- The War Of The Worlds (1980) war board game Designed By: Allen D. Eldridge Published By: Task Force Games
- A 1984 home computer game
- The 1988 TV series
- An arcade game
- The War of the Worlds (radio 1988), an NPR 50th Anniversary radio adaptation
- Jeff Wayne's War World of the Worlds, a 1998 computer game
- The Justice League animated TV series adapts the main events and visuals of the novel for the three part story Secret Origins. Martians attack earth via tripods and a team of superheroes, including Superman, attempt to stop them.
- Volume II of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic book
- The 2005 film directed by Steven Spielberg
- The 2005 film directed by Timothy Hines
- The 2005 film directed by David Michael Latt and its 2008 sequel
- The Art of H. G. Wells by Ricardo Garijo, the third in the series of trading cards, released in 2005[4]
- 2006 graphic novel
- H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds a site specific theatre adaptation by Canadian playwright Ian Case staged in and around Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, BC in 2004 and 2005.
Unreleased adaptations
After World War II, Ray Harryhausen shot a scene of a dying alien falling out of a Martian war machine, test footage for an abandoned project to adapt the story using Wells' original "octopus" concept for the Martians. A video of the footage can be found here [5].
Here Harryhausen talks about his proposed adaptation:
- "Yes, originally, after Mighty Joe [Young] I made a lot of sketches for War of the Worlds. I wanted to keep it in the period that H.G. Wells wrote it, of the Victorian period, and I made eight big drawings, some of which are published - in the book and it would have been an interesting picture, if it was made years ago. But since then so many pictures of that nature have been made that it wouldn't be quite unique as it would have been." [6]
Sequels by other authors
- A number of people have written contemporaneously set stories that describe the same invasion from the perspectives of locations other than Britain. Notable stories of this type are:
- "Night of the Cooters" by Howard Waldrop, in which a Martian war machine lands in Texas.
- "Foreign Devils" by Walter Jon Williams, set in China.
- War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, an anthology of such stories (ISBN 0-553-10353-9).
- Within six weeks of the novel's original 1897 magazine serialisation, the New York Journal American began running a sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss, about an Earth counter-attack against the Martians, led by Thomas Edison. Though this is in fact a sequel to 'fighters from Mars' an entirely revised and un-authorised re-print, both of which were first printed in the Boston Post in 1898[7].
- Science fiction author Eric Brown wrote a short story, "Ulla, Ulla" (2002) about an expedition to Mars, finding the truth behind H.G. Wells' novel.
- In the novel W. G. Grace's Last Case by Willie Rushton, W. G. Grace and Doctor Watson avert a second Martian invasion by attacking the Martian fleet on the far side of the moon with "bombs" containing influenza germs.
- Manly and Wade Wellman wrote Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds which describes Sherlock Holmes's adventures during the Martian occupation of London, turned the Martians into simple vampires, who suck and ingest human blood.
- In the 1970s, Marvel Comics had a character named Killraven Warrior of the Worlds who (in an alternative timeline) fought H. G. Wells' Martians after their second invasion of Earth in 2001. He first appeared in Amazing Adventures volume 2 #18.
- The comic book Scarlet Traces begins a decade later with Great Britain utilising the Martians' technology, and ironic to the allegory of Wells' novel, have become more powerful because of it. Eventually, this leads up to a counter-invasion aimed for Mars in its own sequel, The Great Game.
- In 1962, Soviet author Lasar Lagin published a political pamphlet named "Major Well Andyou" ("Майор Велл Эндъю"), a pun on "Well, and you?", which relates the story of a major in the British Army who collaborates with the Martian invaders. A condemnation of imperialism and capitalism, the story was dominated by Soviet analysis of political issues contemporary to the 1950s and 1960s.
See also
- Alien invasion
- Invasion literature
- Deus ex machina
- Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds
References
- ↑ Landships: Armored Vehicles for Colonial-era Gaming
- ↑ http://www.toyraygun.com/exhibit1.html
- ↑ "What We Saw from the Ruined House" Chapter
- ↑ The War Of The Worlds, The Art of H.G.Wells trading card series
- ↑ 'War of the Worlds' - Ray Harryhausen Martian test footage
- ↑ Ray Harryhausen and Nick Park
- ↑ Edison’s Conquest of Mars, "Forward" by Robert Godwin, Apogee Books 2005
External links
- 2008 edition of The War of the Worlds includes artwork by Warwick Goble, commissioned by Pearsons Magazine in 1897, artwork by Alvim Corrêa for the L.Vandamme 500 copy limited edition in 1906 and cover art by Frank R. Paul, commissioned by Amazing Stories in 1927. Published by Engage Books.
- The War of the Worlds, complete text with embedded audio.
- The War of the Worlds at Project Gutenberg .
- The War of the Worlds as a bilingual ebook with English and Spanish side by side.
- Complete as-delivered transcript and entire original Mercury Theatre Radio broadcast AmericanRhetoric.com.
- TIME Archives A look at perceptions of The War of the Worlds over time.
- Hundreds of cover images of the book's different editions, from 1898 to now.
Bibliography
- Yeffeth, Glenn (Editor) (2005) The War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives on the H. G. Wells Classic. Publisher: Benbella Books ISBN-10: 1932100555
- Coren, Michael (1993) The Invisible Man : The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells. Publisher: Random House of Canada. ISBN-10: 0394222520
- Roth, Christopher F. (2005) "Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult." In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. by Debbora Battaglia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
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