The War of the Worlds

Review ebook The War of the Worlds

Paraphrasing Whitehead, I would say that the safest general characterisation of the science-fiction tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to H. G. Wells. Indeed, The War of the Worlds is probably the most influential novel of the whole science fiction genre, as well as a significant part of the horror category. I remember reading this short novel as a child and being viscerally engrossed and terrified. Rereading it now made me aware of a few more things. First, I realised how th Paraphrasing Whitehead, I would say that the safest general characterisation of the science-fiction tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to H. G. Wells. Indeed, The War of the Worlds is probably the most influential novel of the whole science fiction genre, as well as a significant part of the horror category. I remember reading this short novel as a child and being viscerally engrossed and terrified. Rereading it now made me aware of a few more things. First, I realised how this book sums up and, in a way, accomplishes some of the things H. G. Wells had experimented with before. To name a few: the Darwinian conflict between two similar species (The Time Machine), the fascination for freakish life forms (The Island of Dr Moreau), the chase around working-class London and its surrounding area (The Invisible Man).

It is possible that H. G. Wells’s remarkable book was perceived, at the close of the 19th century, as just a fin de siècle catastrophic story — similar to, say, Mad Max or Terminator at the end of the 20th. In hindsight, The War of the Worlds is much more than that. It is indeed the kernel and the seed of all the later tales of extraterrestrial invasion and tropes of apocalyptic destruction, from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, Michael Faber’s Under the Skin, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation… Not to mention films and TV: Alien, Independence Day, and so many more that I forget as I write this short note.

What strikes me the most is that Wells depicts humanity in the shoes of the invaded party and pictures the invaders as an alien race of bloodthirsty molluscs — which, in itself, sounds like a veiled but stark criticism of Western imperialism and sense of superiority. But, as it turns out, Wells’s prophetic vision was not so much that of a War of the Worlds with extraterrestrial invaders, but precisely a vision of the World War between fellow humans, that would break out some twenty years later, with a technological arsenal not unlike that of the Martians (cf. mechanised artillery, chemical warfare, surgical strikes). Later still, when the Second World War began, and the Nazis were about to invade the whole of Europe, Orson Welles remembered this old tale about a Martian invasion. He turned it into an incredibly relevant radio sensation. The masses of refugees, described by H. G. Wells, fleeing the war in a disorderly and life-threatening manner is a sight anyone may witness even today, despite all the concrete walls or steel fences that are supposed to stop them.

In short, this is an unavoidable masterpiece. The only reproach I could make is regarding the ending. The deadly flu epidemic the Martians eventually suffer from feels a bit like a disappointing Deus ex Machina. As a side note: historically, things unfolded the other way around when Spanish Conquistadors landed on the shores of the New World. They didn’t win against the Aztec and Inca Empires so much because of the superiority of their weapons, religion or culture, but because they were bringing the smallpox virus along with them — the first major and unwitting case of biological warfare.

Edit: Wells’s novel has been brought to the screen a significant number of times, one of the most recent ones being Steven Spielberg’s adaptation (2005) with Tom Cruise. The film takes a few liberties with the book, setting the story in present-day Connecticut. However, one very clever unfaithfulness is that the aliens do not come from Mars but from underground (a nod to The Time Machine, no doubt). Spielberg isn’t new to the alien-first-contact genre. But this is an outright nightmarish and nail-biting take on what had once been a benevolent musical spaceship or a heart-warming horticultural E.T. longing for home — in this film, aliens also play the trombone and are versed in landscaping. Still, they spray their gardens with human blood. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds comes after the intense and graphic scenes of the Omaha Beach assault in Saving Private Ryan and is roughly in the same vein. Some scenes, like the innumerable bodies, suddenly floating down a glistening river, or the empty cloths raining from a blazing sky, are strangely beautiful and horrifying. In the midst of the gruesome devastation, Tom Cruise, Tim Robbins and Dakota Fanning are exceptional, playing the parts of regular people, suddenly overwhelmed with PTSD and facing the brutal ending of all things. …more