Review: The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells

Yes, my first exposure to this
story as a child was Jeff Wayne’s rock opera musical version.  Then the 1950’s George Pal movie, and… well,
I’d seen and heard just about every adaptation of this story (including the
infamous Orsen Welles radio broadcast that allegedly caused mass panic in New
York), before finally getting around to reading the original alien invasion
story that they were all based on.

Almost all of Wells’ famous
sci-fi works – War of the Worlds, Invisible Man, The Time Machine – were written
in a quite short period in the 1890’s, but are by far his most remembered
works.  Whereas Verne was a renowned
futurist and wrote a great deal of early engineering and technology porn, Wells
background was in biology and that shows a little in his writing.  In War of the Worlds, for example, he’s obviously
far more interested in the Martians themselves and the evolution of life on an
alien world than he is in all their war machines.  In Verne’s story ‘From Earth to the Moon’, he
obviously did a lot of research and spent a lot of time describing how we might
get there.  In Wells’ ‘First Men in the
Moon’, how they get there obviously didn’t matter so much to him as exploring another
world and encountering its strange new creatures.  It’s a much more exciting story which no
doubt helped to really popularise the genre.

While The War of the Worlds might
be the most famous alien invasion, it was definitely not the first future
war/invasion tale.  During the Napoleonic
Wars, the French general had first proposed a Channel Tunnel as a means to
invade England, and even had plans drawn up for it.  By the later half of the nineteenth, Germany
was also becoming an industrial power in mainland Europe.  With new technologies being developed, the
British began to sense that their position as a global power was tenuous and
lived in constant fear of invasion.  In
1871 a story appeared in entitled The Battle of Dorking, told from the
perspective of an old soldier in the future recounting an invasion of Britain
from Germany.  This was followed by other
accounts of future war, such as Albert Robida’s ‘War in the 20^th Century’,
that proposed the use of tanks, aerial bombardment, and chemical and germ
warfare.  In the future, many believed,
it would be whoever had the most advanced industry technology that would win
wars.  And then H.G Wells stepped in and
proposed the ultimate threat, penning perhaps one of the best opening
paragraphs ever to a novel:

‘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; that as men busied themselves about
their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as
narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures
that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went
to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under
the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space
as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the
mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there
might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to
welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are
to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast
and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly
and surely drew their plans against us…’

At this point however I would
like to point out that the title of the story is misleading.  It’s not so much a ‘War of the Worlds’ as it
is just Mars versus England.  At least as
far as we know from the story, they never land anywhere else.  The story, an account of the invasion, is
told from the point of view of a nameless journalist in Woking at the time the
first Martian cylinder lands nearby (although there is a diversion as he also
relates what happened to his brother who was caught up in the flight from
London after the war had begun).

After initial attempts to
establish contact fail after the Martians unleash their heat-ray burning Earth’s
ambassadors to a crisp, and half the nearby village, the army is called in while
the Journalist gets his family to safety.
But he then goes back, for some reason which I’m sure must have seemed
important at the time, only to find the Martians have emerged from their
cylinder in huge mechanical tripods and annihilated the human forces arranged
to contain them.  The Journalist is then
just swept along as the Martians make their way north toward London, and
although the British to succeed in destroying a few war machines, ultimately
the superior technology and weapons of the Martians prevails and they rout
everything in front of them.  In addition
to the heat-ray, they unleash a gas simply referred to as ‘black smoke’ that
chokes the life out of everything in front of them.  The journalist witnesses a couple of battles,
but then becomes trapped in a cellar with an increasingly erratic Parson after another
cylinder lands on his house, where he witnesses the vampiric nature of the
aliens as they suck the blood from human’s they’ve captured.

And then, after defeating
everything thrown at them and winning the war, the Martians just… die.  According to the narrator, killed by the one
thing they hadn’t counted on – bacteria.
If you remember from the Verne story I looked at, in the nineteenth
century it seemed a number of people believed that in the future we would
eliminate all bacteria and thus do away with illness.  The Martians, being more advanced, had
already done that and so had no immunity to micro-organisms.  Yes, it seems silly to us now as we know that
bacteria can’t really all be killed and it wouldn’t be a good idea to do so
even if we could.  But Wells’ had to end
the story with Martians beaten not by anything humanity had thrown at them, as
to do otherwise would defeat the point that no matter how powerful we think we
are, the universe is a huge and there’s always going to be something out there
that can kick our ass.  It is worth
noting however that everything about the Martians and what happened to them is
merely speculation on the narrator’s part as no-one is ever able to talk or
communicate with the aliens directly.

Some view this story as in fact
being a satire of The British Empire and colonialism, and there are certainly
passages to suggest that.  Especially at
the beginning of the book where the narrator discusses the treatment of native
peoples by the British, and the fates of the many colonists who succumbed to diseases
they had no immunity to (of course it more often happened the other way round,
with Europeans bringing over diseases native people had no immunity to).  But indeed to this day, fear of alien
invasion really stems from how human beings have treated each other in the
past.

All that aside, if you’re a
sci-fi fan you obviously have to read this book as it’s the original alien
invasion, and like Jules Verne collections of Wells’ works are today usually available
in book and e-book forms at a quite low price.
Also, if there’s ever a chance again for you to see the rock opera
version, do so – it’s effing awesome.