Name: The War of the Worlds
Rating: 3.4375 (8 reviews)
ISBN: 9781424005598

Herbert George Wells

"Great cities destroyed--people fleeing in panic--the countryside in ruins. A burst of flame from Mars heads toward the earth, and a strange ship, unlike anything ever seen here, lands. Soon, it devours everything in its path, people and buildings alike. It is unstoppable. Mankind is in the greatest danger in all its history. Can anyone-or anything-save our world?"--Book back cover.

The War of the Worlds

Hugo

This book is proof that it doesn’t matter how old a book is, as long as it’s good, it can be enjoyed and has the power to transport you to the author’s era. Considering it’s a book from the end of the 1800s, and given the technology that existed back then, it’s amazing how creative and simple the author was in conveying his ideas. I thought I wouldn't enjoy it much after seeing several movies based on this book, but I was wrong. I really enjoyed it and consider it a great science fiction classic that you should read at least once if you like science fiction.

'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...' So begins H. G. Wells' classic novel in which Martian lifeforms take over planet Earth. As the Martians emerge, they construct giant killing machines - armed with heatrays - that are impervious to attack. Advancing upon London they destroy everything in their path. Everything, except the few humans they collect in metal traps. Victorian England is a place in which the steam engine is state-of-the-art technology and powered flight is just a dream. Mankind is helpless against the killing machines from Mars, and soon the survivors are left living in a new stone age.

Tim Pendry

Coming to a novel many decades later and much older is often a revelation (as we noted earlier when reviewing Wells' 'The Time Machine'). Unlike re-reading 'Dracula' where I had little or nothing to add in review even though greatly enjoying the read, 'The War of the Worlds' (1897) had its revelations. The social and scientific context of the novel has been well rehearsed by other critics. Wells is a didactic writer but he covers this up well through his skill as a novelist - the message is there but effectively embedded in a truly horrific (at times) thriller. Like 'The Time Machine', the almost-school teacher is presenting, as a lower middle class lad himself, popular scientific thinking to other lower middle class lads and making a literary career out of it. As with the earlier book, evolution, only four decades after Darwin's 'Origin', is central. The cause of the destruction of the Martians (earthly bacteria) is so well-known as not to be a spoiler but the novel is equally at the tail end of the tussle between religion and science that ended with the victory of the latter. Wells is reflecting and popularising that victory. This can be seen in two of the three characters that the narrator introduces in order to create a human dimension to the story - the curate and the soldier. The curate is a whining weakling. The soldier in effect a social Darwinist on the very edge of the fascism that was to come in due course. Wells' intelligence allows him to present these extremes (with a sympathy much closer directed to the latter) but without accepting them. Our narrator, like many of his readers, can still have recourse to God in extremis and the soldier's ideology of resistance as human rats is detected to be posturing. The novel, in fact, starts not with individuals but with the group of educated middle class people which are the basis of most adventure fiction of the late imperial age. Wells' innovation is to have all but one of them slaughtered in the first act and humanity then becoming ant-like and individualist. That may seem like a contradiction but Wells is capturing a truth about our species which emerges most fully in extreme crisis. A brutal extraterrestrial invasion by a 'superior species' is going to be just the sort of crisis that presents us as we are and not as we would be. Wells is insistent that his narrator - a moral philosopher - be painfully honest about himself and his decision-making even when that might be problematic according the ethical codes of the day. We have to assume that he is being so, of course. Faced with the undefeatable, humanity panics. The 'ants' run from the ant-hill (the city, the town, the ever-present 'row of houses') and become a disorderly rabble seeking only to survive, often at each others' expense. Individuals act blindly as individuals in their flight. In other words, the human hive or ant colony is the sum of biologically-directed individual actions all tending in the same direction of thought and action, whether of social conformity or panicked flight. When social organisation breaks down, civilisation collapses even if it can be re-ordered later. Wells is often called 'prophetic' but what he actually is is clear-thinking. He looks at us as we are, creates events and then extrapolates from that how we will be under such conditions. As a result, we have an account of a refugee flight (not quite accurate) that is 'prophetic' of conditions in wars since. This brings in the third character (the first chronologically) in the brother of the narrator who gives us an account of the flight northwards of the masses from London ending in a sea battle that reminds us that the world's greatest naval power is of little use in a land invasion. Oddly, we never hear what happened to the brother or those under his protection and this is a minor flaw in the story's veneer of 'humanity'. The brother ends up just being the place holder for a separate narrative about panic, refugees and the Imperial Navy. Wells is certainly determined to show us the horror of war even if this is imagined by him rather than coming from any personal experience. It will resonate with anyone who has watched footage from Gaza, the Donbas or the current (2026) mess in the Gulf. The narrator writes: 'Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal'. Yes, well, maybe in 1897 in an imagined London but that could never be said credibly 130 years later. We have all seen it now and sometimes in real time. Many have commented on the topographical precision of the book which is one of its most fascinating features. You can walk where the narrator walked and drive where his brother drove. Often streets are named and even houses may be identifiable in the 'real world'. Wells' fantasy is thus embedded not only in plausible scientific theory (as of the mid-1890s) but in 'location, location, location'. Not only can you trace the whole story on an OS map but Wells is assiduous in indicating soil types and flora, even the layout of suburban houses. We are there! This is not just England but Southern England, most susceptible to continental invasion (a contemporary paranoia), and London, heart of empire but also to be the subject of many apocalyptic destructions in popular literature. In the same year, Grant Allen, whose interest in scientific evolution and literature (and even time travel) matched Wells' own, was to publish 'The Thames Valley Catastrophe' in 'The Strand' which posited London destroyed by volcanism. Most recent tales were more specifically about invasion. Wells' novelty lies not so much in the idea of invasion and destruction (although Wells' invasion is exceptionally and often graphically violent and disturbing) but on the merging of that idea with that of alien life. The conceptual power of this helps to explain its almost mythic subsequent influence. Much great innovation in culture involves hybridisation. 'The War of the Worlds' is no exception - in this case, mechanical interest in science, the awe and wonder at the unknown represented by Mars and the fear at the heart of empire of vulnerability to social evolutionary competitors. Although Welles was a socialist with a bee in his bonnet about world government, there are the seeds of fascistic thinking in here, not necessarily from Wells and certainly not the narrator but from the soldier in Putney who is only following the logic of Social Darwinism in the face of the 'other'. The radical problem is, of course, that there is no room for multicultural perspectives with the Martians. They are not 'migrants'. They are blood-sucking intellectually superior creatures to whom we are ants or cattle depending on the moment. They are 'Daleks' in that respect. Some commentators have tried to over-play the imperialist 'discourse'. The Martians are supposed to be us in relation to our imperial subjects but the imperial subjects are not ants or cattle (except to Nazis much later), at least from our elite's perspective. The lesson here may not be a liberal one. If the Putney soldier is right (and he is not wrong in his analysis), the matter becomes not one of bleating about injustices today but of finding ways to become superior again ('seize the machines') in order to do to the Martians what they are doing to us - and so 'exterminate the beasts'. I mentioned the Daleks. Well, take a look at Terry Nation's 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' from the 1960s (dreadfully written by the way) which is still available on BBC I-Player. These analogues to Nazis are regarded in much the same way - exterminate or be exterminated. In the end, thanks not to us but to microbes and the natural order (perhaps to God if you are so inclined), normal 'hive-life' can be resumed without such bloodthirsty resistance strategies but Wells leaves us with a doubt at the end about whether the existential struggle will be resumed one day. With the element of surprise gone, the odds are evened up but it does not look like there is much room for diplomatic negotiation. Humanity, having returned to normal, is likely to be thinking of ways of removing the threat by travelling itself outwards and doing its bit of exterminating. Perhaps the heirs to Wells (recalling the aerial rule in 'Things to Come') are more Heinlein-like than we have considered. The irony of 'Wings Over the World' being based in Basra, Iraq, given events in our century, is not lost on this reviewer but the dream is one of technocratic rule from above. None of this 'world government' nonsense is to be found in 'War of the Worlds'. The politics is barely there. The British Empire is assumed. Perhaps a degree of constructive amity amongst nations supplying relief to the post-war recovery. The idea of 'humanity' and civilisation is, however, there. Far from some late imperial guilt trip about empire, the novel is thinking ahead to a consolidated humanity extending its imperium through space. A more rational form of 'Putney militarism' scientifically directed, kind to its own but not to others, is the implicit ideology of the book.

'Death!' I shouted. 'Death is coming! Death!' In this pioneering, shocking and nightmarish tale, naïve suburban Londoners investigate a strange cylinder from space, but are instantly incinerated by an all-destroying heat-ray. Soon, gigantic killing machines that chase and feed on human prey are threatening the whole of humanity. A pioneering work of alien invasion fiction, The War of the World's journalistic style contrasts disturbingly with its horrifying visions of the human race under siege. (Website Amazon.de).

The War of the Worlds

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