Praise for The War of the Worlds

‘Wells occupies an honoured place in science fiction. Without him, indeed, I can’t see how any of it could have happened’

Kingsley Amis

‘The Prospero of all the brave new worlds of the mind, and the Shakespeare of science fiction’

Brian W. Aldiss

‘The granddaddy of all alien invasion stories’

Amazon.com

The War of the
Worlds

H. G. WELLS

‘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?’

KEPLER (quoted in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy.’)

INTRODUCTION

Wells’ The War of the Worlds comes at the end of something and at the beginning of something bigger. On the one hand it’s a sort of culmination to a vigorous but now little-read subgenre of the late Victorian novel, ‘Invasion Fiction’. On the other, it defined and to a large extent created what would become a widely-read mode of twentieth and twenty-first century art: science fiction.

In 1871 a retired military officer called George Tomkyns Chesney, anxious (as military officers often are) that the nation’s army was underfunded and unprepared, wrote a speculative near-future short story. The Battle of Dorking portrayed a Britain overstretched by patrolling its imperial possessions, complacent and vulnerable at home; during the course of the narrative England is invaded and defeated by the same efficient Prussian army that had, the previous year, humbled the might of France. It was a huge hit, selling 70,000 copies in few weeks, becoming widely discussed and provoking questions in the British Parliament. Chesney had touched a national nerve, and his success inspired imitators – over sixty tales of future invasion and war, some melodramatic to the point of hysteria, were published in the following decades. By the end of the 1890s Britain had been fictionally invaded by Prussians, French, Russians, ‘orientals’ and others. Many of these books in effect wallowed in their accounts of the destruction of familiar home counties landmarks; a sort of lust for disaster masquerading as concern.

Wells’ novel is a brilliant mutation of this politically reactionary mode of writing. Instead of an earthly threat he posits an extraterrestrial one; instead of scoring cheap political points he creates an existential fable, situates humankind in a vaster context, and writes one of the most influential founding texts of a new genre. Indeed, overfamiliarity with what is (after all) one of the most celebrated SF novels tends to obscure just how good Wells was at this sort of writing. For such a brief novel The War of the Worlds is not only extremely readable but extraordinarily vivid and evocative: a muscular little narrative line picked out with deft descriptions and set-pieces.

It helped that the mise en scène was a place he knew intimately, the landscapes of the shires to the south-west of London, where he lived. He learned to ride the bicycle over Horsham Common, for instance, the same territory onto which the first of the Martian cylinders falls. In his Autobiography he recalls ‘wheeling about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians’; and it’s easy to imagine his authorial satisfaction. I am also a science fiction novelist and I happen to live in this same territory, more or less. I can vouch for the accuracy of Wells’ evocation of the area, recognisable even after more than a century. Actually I also once wrote a novel in which war ravages the land between Woking and central London. Of course, I was working in conscious imitation of Wells’ great founding text. Wells, on the other hand, was being brilliantly original. He spent the whole of the 1890s creating from scratch conceptual templates that later generations of SF authors would laboriously work through: time travel and the romance of the far future in The Time Machine (1895); what we would nowadays call stories of genetic engineering in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); invisibility in The Invisible Man (1897) – none of these tropes had been used before. But of all his masterpieces of the 1890s The War of the Worlds is surely the most accomplished.

His familiarity with location and social milieu means he is able to use ordinariness as the ground against which the extraordinariness of Martian invaders can be more effectively offset. The novel’s opening brilliantly manages (to quote from chapter 8) ‘the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social order headlong.’ In a sly allusion to the vogue for stories in the Battle of Dorking idiom, Wells’ narrator notes that the appearance of belligerent aliens ‘did not make the sensation that an ultimatum with Germany would have done.’ Not that the novel is removed from contemporary political and ideological concerns; on the contrary. It is just that the times have changed. Chesney’s brief story of German invasion appeared a year after the Franco-Prussian war – a conflict fought on the Continent only a few score miles from London, between two major European powers. Wells writes his metaphorical war-story a few years after a very different conflict: the Boer War between the British and white South African settlers – vastly further away. Behind that conflict stood a series of Zulu wars, in which advanced British had invaded another country and used their greatly superior ballistic weaponry against populations armed with spears to devastating effect. Many critics have noted how The War of the Worlds inverts the logic of colonial warfare: London, the centre of a global movement of armed colonisation, becomes instead the victim; our cannons and ironclads are as primitive before the Martian heat-ray and poison gas as ‘bows and arrows against the lightning’.

There are many features of the novel that look, in hindsight, extraordinarily prescient: the alien’s heat-ray anticipates laser technology, the lethal ‘black smoke’ they use looks forward to the use of mustard gas in the First World War. But perhaps the most insightful was the way Wells ended his narrative. He writes an inverted fable of Western colonial aggression, defeated not by military force but by microbes. It was not until many decades later that historians of the European empires made plain the extent to which it was precisely these agents – microbes – that made colonisation possible in the first place. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) brilliantly exposes how European resistance to certain diseases, and the lack of these germs in the rest of the world, laid the grounds for the conquering of the Americas and Africa.

Brian Aldiss, one of the most Wellsian of British SF authors, has described Wells as ‘an astringent writer’. He means this as praise (‘nowadays, astringency is out of fashion in popular literature’, he adds, ‘mores the pity’) and it’s easy to see the ways in which The War of the Worlds scours the complacencies not merely of little-englanders, but of little-humaners. Still, I’m not sure this novel is altogether as astringent as it might be. Perhaps the novel is better described by a term coined by another English writer of fantastic literature, a generation younger than Wells but with a similarly global reach, J.R.R. Tolkien. The term is ‘eucatastrophe’. Disaster presses and is on the verge of overwhelming us entirely, only to be averted at the very last minute. It is precisely the eucatastrophic quality of the novel that prevents it from being just a sour, cautionary tale. Wells was the prophet of social as well as individual hygiene, a writer who often seems to despise bumbling, decadent, snuffling humanity. When he tells us that ‘Martian sanitary science eliminated illness ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the contagions and fevers of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life’ we might think his tone is one of admiration. But the end of The War of the Worlds makes plain that too ruthless a pursuit of social cleanliness is a weakening rather than a strengthening thing. Disease, like empire, is a more complex matter than that.

Wells’ Martians travel between worlds in a cylinder fired out of an enormous cannon. Decades earlier Jules Verne’s De La Terre A La Lune (1865) had imagined humans travelling to the moon by the same means. It’s not a very practicable mode of transportation, of course; a moment’s thought makes it plain the abruptness and intensity of the acceleration would destroy any life forms that tried to undertake it. This is sometimes taken as evidence either of ignorance or lack of imagination on the part of these authors, as if thinking of other means of achieving escape velocity was beyond them. But this does a disservice to Verne and Wells, both of whom were well aware of the dangers of sudden acceleration – something, indeed, more over than underestimated in the nineteenth-century, as the cautiousness with which railway speeds were regulated demonstrates. More, rockets had been a staple of fantastic fiction since at least Cyrano de Bergerac’s Contes in the later seventeenth century (Cyrano’s protagonist first travels into space by rocket-power, and also by utilising the attractive potential of the sun). Wells himself wrote of a spacecraft powered by ‘anti-gravity’ in 1901’s First Men in the Moon; and his contemporaries thought-up various other means of getting into space – balloons were very popular; so was teleportation. Why, then, did Wells fall back on the big gun?

The answer, I think, The War of the Worlds is as much a metaphorical fiction as it is rational extrapolation. Big guns are explosive. Big guns are the technology of big war, and war, bigger even than Lieutenant-Colonel Chesney foretold, was the coming thing. We can, in other words, take seriously the ‘war’ in the title of Wells’s title – yet another way in which H.G. was prescient, in this fable, was in the way he wrote about war not as warriors clashing on a battlefield but as civilians living under bombardment and gas-attack, and the massed tides of refugees. Chapter 16 ‘The Exodus from London’ is not only one of the first, but also one of the most powerful representations of the way war would figure in the twentieth-century: masses of terrified civilians flooding away from the fighting. War in this novel is no longer a horizontal interaction between two armies. It now has a terrible, vertical vector – just as the following century would see shells, V2s and cruise-missiles plummeting down from on high. When the narrator says ‘suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear’ [1:5] he is describing the Martians as externalisations of a state of mind; and that, in a crucial sense, is what The War of the Worlds is about. Unlike balloons, anti-gravity and even rockets, big guns are scary; they provoke fear. They are loud, and their shells fall like thunder from a clear sky.

One of the touches in the novel I most admire is the subtle, allusive way Wells implies the post-invasion world, the way things are after the last page of his novel. From the hints Wells drops, we can intuit an English society not radically different, yet changed. The most obvious aspects of this – the ‘almost complete specimen’ of a Martian ‘in spirits at the Natural History Museum’, the ‘sightseers about the Martian machine’ that still stands on Primrose Hill – are, because of their obviousness, the least interesting. More haunting, I think, are the artfully throwaway references in the novel’s early chapters:

I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved in those days to look up at the night sky) I saw nothing of it. [1:2]

‘In those days . . .’ But presumably no more, the night sky now the venue of fear rather than wonder. A few pages later, the narrator notes that ‘few of the common people in England had anything but the vaguest astronomical ideas in those days.’ Now, the implication is, everybody knows about the larger solar system and the danger it poses. Most strikingly of all, it seems to me, is a sentence towards the end of the opening chapter:

People in these latter times scarcely realize the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers.

It’s never been clear to me why the aftermath of the Martian invasion should have so reduced the provision of news. Perhaps the implication is that a shattered social infrastructure cannot support such things as printed newspapers the way it once did; but I read another significance into this reference – that the disasters have cured humanity of its passion for news. The news is a way in which we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves, and one of the more radical things about The War of the Worlds is, paradoxically enough, its suspicion of storytelling. Wells’ narrator falls in with a curate, whose narrative of the invasion – that the Martians are agents of God’s judgment against a sinful world – is shown to be inadequate to account for events. Later he meets an artilleryman who spins a Utopian future narrative, with humanity creating a new subterranean civilisation. But he is an ineffectual dreamer, and a drinker, his storytelling equally irrelevant to the grim reality. The irony of this repeated device is that The War of the Worlds is of course a story itself, a narrative we are invited to mistrust. The narrator tells us so at the beginning:

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me. (1:7)

The narrator’s quixotic mood is integral to the effect of the story: sometimes he is rationally dedicated to self-preservation, a sensible individual; at other times strangely suicidal moods overcome him (‘an insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it’). Sometimes he travels over the landscape of the novel with purpose – to investigate the cylinder, to find his wife. At other times he moves passively, or even randomly. He is enough of an everyman to convey Wells’ point: that the human species is inconstant, passive and easily overcome.

A popular mode of Victorian fiction was the so-called ‘Condition of England novel’, usually large-scale attempts fictively to anatomise the class and other conflicts of country as a whole. Post-Chesney ‘invasion stories’ are also, in their way, condition-of-England tales; it is just that the condition is simplified from being a network of interrelations between rich and poor, north and south, men and women. Chesney and his followers said, in effect: ‘the condition of England is – vulnerable’; and they did so with an agenda of rearmament. Wells, though, sees vulnerability as a more than national condition. It is existential, global – cosmic, in scope. This is one of the core narratives of science fiction, and it has rarely, if ever, been better articulated than in this genre-defining novel.

Adam Roberts