The War of the Worlds

Another re-read of this seminal SF classic after watching the recent TV adaptation. This is as gripping and horrific as ever in its stark descriptions of the effects of the invasion on the inhabitants of this small part of south east England/London, and full of the author's thoughtful ruminations on the nature of ethics and, for example, the role of European man vs. other races, and humans in general vs. animals, but done in a way that complements the narrative, rather than seeming sententious as in some of his less well known works. Deserves every accolade it receives as being a classic of both science fiction and literature in general.

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There is little new that can be said about this classic SF show more novel, the first great invasion of Earth novel published by the father of the genre in 1898, and the precursor for so many that have followed since. This is, of course, a re-read, prompted by my having recently got into the mood by listening to Jeff Wayne's musical version, and watching both the 1953 George Pal film version (with excellent special effects for the time) and the 2005 Stephen Spielberg one (much better than I remembered from my first viewing). The description is dramatic and the imagery vivid, and in 1898 this would have been very graphic and, aside from the obvious features of the historical period, much of this reads like more recent science fiction novels in its uncompromising description of death, destruction and the worst of human behaviour as the massive tide of humanity escapes from the oncoming Martian war machines and their deadly heat-rays. The narrator, his wife and his brother are unnamed, as are the artilleryman and the curate, and there are very few named characters except for the astronomer Ogilvy and one or two others at the very beginning. This allows Wells to focus on the driving narrative. It is very short, only 141 pages, but this shows how a great novel does not need to be many hundreds of pages long. Tremendous stuff. show less

Much more engaging than I expected. And richer. Well worth reading. I am so glad that I found a large print copy; squinting at cheap editions never worked for me, and I dreaded trying to read it digitally.

A map would be nice though. It's not necessary, but there are a *lot* of place names thrown out, a lot of travelling, and it would be fun to follow along.

I appreciate the comparison of Martian::Man to Man::ant, but even more so the recognition that we don't just wipe out ants, but we commit atrocities on mass scale against fellow humans.

I'm especially impressed by, and find myself enjoying, the chapter near the end with the artilleryman. The least interesting thing he says is "Dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it show more bad."

And the descriptions of spectral, quiet London. And the sort of PTSD the author admits to in the epilogue. Etc. Just a wonderful novel, worthy of its reputation. show less

Martian invasion!

You know what is truly remarkable about this classic? That it was written in 1898! Long before airplanes, satellites, WWI, and WWII. Written at time when viruses had only just been identified, and when the possibility an advanced intelligence might land on a foreign celestial body was merely the titillating purview of science fiction. (Even humans have now done that.)

The War of the Worlds is the Father of the Alien Invasion story, the originator of a whole series of tropes of overwhelming apocalypse. As I read, I kept thinking of McCormac's The Road, and also a recent read for me, Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.

But Wells did it first.

The writing is so modern in its style, too, which is a bit of a surprise to me show more since this was a Victorian novel. I dislike the tendency to floridly overwrite that the Victorians so often did. Indeed, I often noticed, with delight, that Wells said what he had to say, and then left it. That is so much more powerful than explaining ad nauseum as if we readers are idiots. His prose was not florid, not verbose; it was brutal and lean. His only nod to the prevailing Victorian taste that I could see was the story's generally uplifting tone at the end. Definitely not a 2oth century invasion ending as in, say, Clarke's Childhood’s End.

I was pleasantly surprised with Wells' often made comparison of the Martians' unfeeling attitude toward humankind with humankind's own treatment toward our own fellow terrestrial species. Martians were cruelly indifferent and selfish. Humans are cruelly indifferent and selfish.

In the end, it wasn't humans' superior intelligence or might that overcame the Martians, it was one of those very low lower species, which was perfectly apt.

Listened via Librivox, https://librivox.org/the-war-of-the-worlds-version-3-by-h-g-wells/ narrated by Cori Samuel, with her wonderful voice and diction. show less

“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.”

So opens what is H.G. Wells best known novel and the one that is regarded as the forerunner of much of the Sci-Fi novels and movies that we see today.

I don't intend to say too much about the plot as its already well known other than its a fairly simple one; the narrator sees the Martians land and tries to survive. show more Instead I would like to talk about the two characters with whom the narrator spends most of his time with during the invasion, the curate and the artilleryman.

I won't pretend that I know anything about Wells views on religion but if the curate is anything to go by it seems pretty obvious that he had little time for people who claim to be religious but fail to act and live by the teachings that they profess to follow. The curate is a whining selfish glutton who views the invasion as God's judgment and is unable to see what he has done to deserve it.

“‘Be a man!’ said I. ‘You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes, and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.’”

In contrast the narrator sees the invasion from a more scientific standpoint marvelling at how far advanced the Martian technology is. Whereas the curate is fatalistic about mankind's future and can only see things in the short-term, the artilleryman is far more optimistic, whilst admitting that the Martians have won this battle he believes that eventually mankind will overthrow the invaders and reclaim the world. The narrator is initially taken in by the artilleryman's bold predictions but soon comes to realise that he is a idle dreamer who will never accomplish anything and so leaves him.

In fact this to me is the over-riding message in this novel. If people act as individuals rather than in a coordinated manner then they will never overcome the worlds problems. Many may see the Martians' demise as an anti-climax but I fear that they may be missing the point. It wasn't mankind who defeated the Martians here rather microscopic, invisible germs working together and if humans cannot work together to solve the world's problems, global warming etc then Mother Nature will find a way; and that might not be to the benefit of mankind.

This book is a classic for a reason. Its wonderfully paced with some great characters and a simple story but not so simple message that still feels relevant today despite being first published well over a hundred years ago. I initially struggled to get the musical version of this story out of my mind and maybe for that reason alone I felt that this wasn't quite as good as 'The Time Machine'. show less

One of the books that set the foundation for later science-fiction novels, War of the Worlds is a tale of a Martian invasion of Earth. The book is split into two sections, the first titled The Coming of the Martians and the second The Earth Under the Martians. For a book that is only 200 pages long, it took me a long time to get into it. All throughout the first part of the novel I kept thinking "yes, okay, the Martians are frightening and literally bloodthirsty, the protagonist has been separated from his wife and home and the whole of England is being destroyed, but why don't I care?" It seemed to me that Wells never makes you feel anything for the protagonist, nor his brother, who features prominently in the story and whose show more "adventures" bored me to death. It is also perhaps a mark of of the age I grew up in that I didn't even wince while reading the same gory descriptions of disembodied human parts, burning buildings and cadavers that shocked Wells's readers in the 19th century.

However, after reading half of the novel I finally stopped expecting character development and stopped hoping the protagonist's ordeal would move me. For I realized that the narrator is not, in fact, the real protagonist of this book. The real protagonist here is the whole of humanity and Wells is excellent at exposing and ridiculing the folly of the human race. For me, The War of the Worlds is best read as a satire on Victorian culture. First of all Wells critiques imperialism and colonialism in a very poignant way. Thus, the same British Empire that is constantly invading other countries is now being invaded by a more powerful race that merely wants to expand its territory and pays no regard to human lives. The invasion literature of the time that wants Britain attacked by a foreign force (typically Germany) is also ridiculed when Britain is in fact attacked by aliens. Furthermore, Wells mocks his contemporaries for still clinging obsessively to religion, after proofs to the contrary offered by Darwin's theories and by the (then) recent developments in geology, anthropology, astronomy and other sciences. In the book, a clergyman who considers the coming of the Martians to be the biblical Armageddon and prays for God to save humanity is presented as mentally disturbed and is, eventually, punished for his outdated views. Wells' message is more than obvious. The Martians are never presented as mysterious, supernatural beings that no one understands. In fact the detailed description of their anatomy and their possible evolution process was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of the novel. Never before have the words "science-fiction" been more aptly used to describe a book. The War of the Worlds is exactly that - a book in which all the ideas are based on actual scientific theories enriched by Wells's imagination.

Conclusion? The second part is much better than the first one; once you accept that you're not gonna care whether the narrator reunites with his wife or not and instead try to observe how the entire human race reacts to the invasion, the book can only get better. show less

"For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well." (pg. 144)

To read H. G. Wells is to read the father of science-fiction, perhaps rivalled only by Jules Verne, and if The War of the Worlds is to be read more out of respect than joy, it deserves a lot of respect. This is Genesis for sci-fi, the archetypal model of the genre: a short, speculative piece, low on characterization but bold on theme and ideas, rooted in what was known to science of the time but pushing that knowledge to its limits.

It's hard to appreciate just how original and inventive this piece must have been in 1898. Before space exploration, before even the Wright Brothers, Wells creates a show more scenario of invasion from another planet, convincing even if a modern reader necessarily notices some of the science has since proven to be in error. Wells anticipates societal breakdown long before the 'total war' of the Second World War, and poison gas sixteen years before the First (the passage on page 91 where Wells describes the people choking under the low, malignant cloud of 'Black Smoke' could, with very few changes, pass for an extract from Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front). Similarly, the armoured vehicles the Martians use on London could be seen as precursors to tanks. Wells has his Martians harvesting humans for food, turning southern England into their own personal Chinese wet market, before they succumb to bacteria, a point not lost on me as I read the book under coronavirus lockdown in 2020. He creates the Heat-Ray – anticipating lasers. The space gun which launches the Martian invaders from their planet to ours, though scientifically implausible, was an inspiration to Robert Goddard, who created the first feasible rockets and ushered in the Space Age that led to man's landing on the Moon and, perhaps, one day, Mars. The footprint of this slight book is enormous.

With that in mind, it pains me to admit that, as a story, The War of the Worlds is quite average. It reads quickly, because it is so short, and because it engages with such inventive ideas it is never dull. And yet, there is little in the way of plot, characterization or narrative flair. It follows a nameless man who witnesses the arrival of the first Martians, but the reaction and the lack of incredulity leave much to be desired. This surprise, public extra-terrestrial attack, in what was at the time the world's premier city and hub of empire, did "not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done" (pg. 35). This seems dubious. "Anyone coming along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been amazed at the sight," the narrator tells us on page 22. Well, quite. His subsequent narration of his survival under the Martian-induced apocalypse is very dry, with all the vim of an after-action report.

There is a provincialism to the story that is very jarring, along with a low energy, and it makes it hard to buy into the threat of the Martians even as they butcher the London populace en masse. "So greatly had the strength of the Martians impressed me," our narrator writes on page 56, "that I had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and go with her out of the country forthwith." Such lines, which are the norm, read like a polite but negative restaurant review, or, in their excessive reserve and settings like Chobham, Woking and Horsell, like a comedy that never breaks character. Speaking of character, neither the nameless narrator, nor his beloved nameless 'my wife', emerge as people for the reader to invest in. This is an ideas book, and nothing else.

Which is why it is the book's saving grace that it actually tries to say something valuable with its ideas. Even if the technology and ideas can seem old-hat nowadays, Wells – through his narrator – explicitly compares the Martians' curb-stomp of the heart of the British Empire to that empire's domination of other lands, asking difficult questions of the then-dominant imperialism of the West. "The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants… Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" (pg. 9). It is a bold challenge, and Wells, admirably, goes even further, juxtaposing the Martians' treatment of humans (like ants – pg. 152) to man's often-cruel dominion over the animals. It is surely no coincidence that mankind's eventual victory – or, more accurately, reprieve – at the end of the book comes not from force of arms or human ingenuity, but from bacteria, the "microscopic allies" that share our world, slaying the invaders (pg. 168).

In such ways, Wells proves to be modern not only in his technological ideas, but also somewhat in his morality. He moves beyond the Victorian gentleman-adventures of his own time, however enjoyable they still are to read, and provides one of the first and most enduring commentaries on the modern world. Even if, as I said at the start of my review, the book is better read out of respect than for storytelling joy, that respect is unending. show less

4/5

It's a wonder to me that Wells wrote this book 130 years ago now, and that it's survived that time without aging as much as some books do in 30 years. Wells created an entire genre of literature that would otherwise not exist today in its same form.

Wells questions what he sees as the future of humanity in its technology and morality. He uses the martians as a future version of ourselves, one where our morality has continued to wither in the face of our increasing intellect, and our technology gives us full power to dispense our will on those living beings that share a planet with us. He questions the path that he sees our species heading towards, and warns that our ignorance in these matters will lead to our own destruction, as well show more as the destruction of all that we value.

The prose itself can sometimes leave you wanting for more. Wells writes in a stately and sometimes antiquated manner, that occasionally reads as a news broadcast rather than a personal account of genocide. That being said, Wells also finds moments of true humanity as he describes vivid and horrid scenes of human nativity and suffering. I found the depictions of hopeless mob mentality and the stoic silences that are left behind after destruction of the martians to be quite moving. His characters are rather flat and monotone, unfortunately, which may have set the stage for genre as a whole.

Though not without its flaws, I think that War of the Worlds feels more or less timeless in a sense. A piece of literature that is as much a time capsule of the moment, as well as something that will continue to be relevant in the present for a long time. show less