The War of the Worlds (novel)

The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novel (or novella) which describes an invasion of England by aliens from Mars. It is is one of the most well-known depictions of an alien invasion of Earth.

Plot summary

The story is told by an unnamed narrator (essentially a fictionalized version of Wells himself) who witnesses the aftermath of a meteor landing on Horsell Common, near London. The meteor is soon revealed to be a space-going cylinder launched from the planet Mars. (The exact method of this launch is not revealed, but indirect evidence indicates it to be a vast cannonlike device). Attempts to communicate with the sluggish, bulky, tentacled inhabitants of the ship prove fruitless and even fatal, as onlookers are incinerated by a laser-like Heat-Ray projected from the cylinder's impact crater.

The Martians then assemble enormous three-legged "fighting machines" which go forth to attack the surrounding human communities, armed with both the heat-ray and a chemical weapon: "the Black Smoke". Other interplanetary capsules land across the English countryside, and the invasion spreads. A frantic mass evacuation of London begins; among the fleeing swarms of humanity is the narrator's brother, who eventually escapes across the English Channel to France. One of the tripods is destroyed in Shepperton by an artillery battery, and two more are brought down in the Tillingham Bay by the torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child before the vessel is sunk, but soon all organized resistance has been beaten down and the Martians hold sway over much of southern England.

The Narrator becomes trapped in a half-destroyed building overlooking the crater of one of the Martian landing sites and 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 is not alone; with him is a curate whose intellect and reason have been damaged by the trauma he experienced during the attacks and whose irrational behavior finally causes him to be discovered and dragged away by the Martians. 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 the invaders have abruptly succumbed to terrestrial disease-causing microbes, to which they have no immunity.

The alternate ending

The book contains a thoroughly worked-out alternative ending, presented through the vision of an artilleryman which the hero meets in his wanderings: 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; a nucleus of daring humans would hide out in tunnels and sewers, and would have approximately the same place in the Martian-dominated ecology as rats in the previous human one; but after the passage of generations, these defiant humans would learn to duplicate the Martian weapons and proceed to destroy the invaders. The artilleryman's ambition is eventually exposed as nothing more than one man's delusion of grandeur — he has no means with which to set about the project.

John Christopher's trilogy The Tripods attempts to write in full this alternate ending. Many of the details are different — Christopher's invaders come from another solar system rather than Mars, and they do not use humans as food, but intend to eventually eliminate humanity altogether; still, Wells' basic scheme — a successful alien invasion, the conquerors striding over the Earth for many generations in huge tripedal machines, and a daring small band of humans hiding in caves and tunnels eventually defeating them against all odds — is faithfully followed by Christopher.

Robert A. Heinlein took up the same theme, in a slightly more humorous way, in his The Number of the Beast where the heroes visit several different versions of Mars. One of them is the home planet of Martians who managed to hold on to the conquered Earth. The heroes encounter tribes of humans living in the Martian wilds, descendants of captive humans who had been transported to Mars by the conquerors and there managed to escape. Also on Mars, the wild humans still speak cockney English — while the Martians' obedient slaves seem descended mainly from upper-class Englishmen.

Sequence of events

Ten Martian landings are mentioned in the novel commencing in June "early in the twentieth century":

First Martian Landing (Day 1): Horsell Common.
Second Martian Landing (Day 2): Addlestone Golf links.
Third Martian Landing (Day 3): Pyrford.
Fourth Martian Landing (Day 4): Bushey Heath.
Fifth Martian Landing (Day 5): Sheen.
Sixth Martian Landing (Day 6): Wimbledon.
Seventh Martian Landing (Day 7): Primrose Hill, London.
8th, 9th, 10th Landings (Days 8, 9, 10): landing sites not mentioned in the book - presumably within London.

The duration of the war is three weeks:

On Days 1 and 2, the Martians secure their initial bridgehead around Woking.
On Day 3, they begin first major offensives of the invasion (the Battle of Weybridge/Shepperton and begin the attack on London).
Day 4 sees the great panic and exodus from London.
On Day 5, the narrator is imprisoned by the fifth Martian landing.
On Day 6, the city of London is entirely occupied by the Martians.
Day 7 sees the Battle of Southend and the sacrifice of the Thunder Child.
During Days 8 to 18, the narrator watches the Martians while still trapped.
Day 10 is the approximate date on which Leatherhead (the town to which the narrator had sent his wife for safety) is destroyed by a Martian, killing everyone. Fortunately, his wife escapes before the attack and they are reunited after the Martians' destruction.
On days 19 and 20, the narrator makes his way to London.
In the early morning of day 21, the Martians are found dead.

Scientific predictions and accuracy

In 1898, Italian astronomers had observed natural features on Mars which were improperly translated into English as canals. This fueled 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 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Military theorists in the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth 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 prior to 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, although Wells also presents less fantastic depiction of the armored fighting vehicle in his short story The Land Ironclads. [http://www.toyraygun.com/exhibit1.html

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 which "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.

A further development of that idea, that the Martians have given up their stomachs and digestive tracts and instead they subsist by introducing the blood of other creatures into their veins, is sometimes criticised on biological grounds.

Manly and Wade Wellamn, who wrote Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds which describes the famous detective's adventures during the Martian occupation of London, turned the Martians into simple vampires, who suck and ingest human blood.

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 depicting the Martian invasion as unjust, regardless of the Martian technological superiority. Wells himself introduces this theme in the novel's first chapter:

"And before we judge them aliens 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."

There is a small autobiographical element to the book: Wells seems to have taken great pleasure in the fictional devastation of locations where he had spent an unhappy childhood.

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 personally were substantially influenced to take their stance by reading Wells' book, which vividly conveys human beings' horror at becoming in effect the Martians' food animals. He surmises that many other people may have been similarly affected, though it might not have been Wells' intention to propagate vegetarianism. In many passages, an explicit comparison is drawn between the Martians' treatment of humans and the humans' own treatment of cows, rabbits, rats, ants and other creatures which mankind in one way or another treads underfoot.

Many may argue that the book was a message directed to the public saying that the planet is not as safe as it seems. It may act as warning that at any point, something could happen resulting in the downfall of Earth.

Indeed, while there had never been a "War of the Worlds" like the one described by Wells, the real World War which broke out two decades later did have much the psychological and cultural effect which Wells predicted, of shattering the complacency and self-assurance of Nineteenth Century Europe in general and Victorian Britain in particular. And the vivid description of the refugees fleeing London en masse was to be enacted in reality again and again during the cataclysmic wars of the Twentieth Century.

Unanswered questions

The narrator comments that on the fourth or fifth night of his imprisonment in the rubble of the fifth Martian landing, he heard two sets of six distinct reports - sounding like heavy guns firing. No explanation is ever given for this event.
There is no description of the aftermath of the Southend engagement (Martians vs HMS Thunder Child), so it was not explained if the three supporting ironclads did any damage to the third Martian fighting machine.
After the Thunder Child incident, no account of the narrator's brother is given, although it can be assumed that he survived to tell the narrator of the events he witnessed. (The original edition, published in Pearson's Magazine, indicates that he married one of his female companions from the London Exodus)
No information on the landing sites of the eighth, ninth, and tenth Martian invasion ships were given. The only information given is that the site of the seventh landing was "the final and largest" base.
The narrator's name and his brother's name are never revealed. Some altered versions say he was H. G. Wells himself and that his brother is Wells' brother Frank.

Adaptations

The War of the Worlds has been adapted numerous times for radio, film, TV and video games.

Influences

This theme of an alien invasion has remained popular ever since, some recent 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.

A number of people have written follow-up stories, often telling how the invasion went in places other than Britain. Two notable stories of this type are "Night of the Cooters" by Howard Waldrop, in which a Martian war machine lands in Texas, and "Foreign Devils" by Walter Jon Williams, set in China. War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, is an anthology of such stories (ISBN 0553103539).

The idea of powered armor and huge, walking, piloted war machines also originated in The War of the Worlds. The AT-AT walkers in Episode V 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.

Eric Brown wrote a short story, "Ulla, Ulla," (2002) about an expedition to Mars, finding the truth behind H.G. Wells' novel.

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 free the world of alien domination.

Within six weeks of the novel's original 1897 magazine serialization, the New York Journal American began running a sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss, about an American counterattack against the Martians, spearheaded by Thomas Edison. The sequel debuted in the January 12 issue of the Journal American and ran until the February 10 issue. The sequel was published in book form in 1947, and an abridged version appeared in 1954 in The Treasury of Science Fiction Classics. In 1969, Forrest J. Ackerman published an edited version, called Invasion of Mars. In 2005, Apogee Books published an unedited, unabridged version with the original newspaper illustrations (ISBN 0-9738203-0-6).

A French-Canadian author, Jean-Pierre Guillet, wrote a sequel to the book called "La Cage de Londres," ("The Cage of London"). After the aliens were defeated, they plotted revenge, and came back prepared to finally enslave humanity, and breed it for their bloody needs. The Cage of London is one of those breeding sites.

In the comic version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the invasion by the Martians is told from the perspective of The League, who are instructed to contact Doctor Moreau so that they can unleash H-142, a biological weapon that is a hybrid of anthrax and streptococcus upon the Martians.

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.

In the 1970's, Marvel Comics had a character named Killraven Warrior of the Worlds who (in an alternate timeline) fought H. G. Wells' Martians after their second invasion of Earth. He first appeared in Amazing Adventures volume 2 #18.

In 1975, Manly Wade Wellman and his son Wade Wellman published Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds in which Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Professor Challenger experience the events described in the original H.G. Wells novel.

In 1978, Toshihiro Nishikado working at Taito designed the aliens for the popular arcade video game Space Invaders based on the description of the octopus-like Martians from the original Wells novel, according to an October 2005 interview with the British gaming magazine Edge.

In one episode of Invader Zim GIR watchs a movie that features an alien invasion being defeated by germs

External links

1898 novels | Mars in fiction | Science fiction novels | The War of the Worlds

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