The War of the Worlds

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The War of the Worlds

Illustration from the 1906 French edition
Author Herbert George Wells
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher William Heinemann
Publication date 1898
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback) & E-book
Pages 303 pp (May change depending on the publisher and the size of the text)
ISBN N/A

The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novella which describes an invasion of England by aliens from Mars. It is one of the earliest and best-known depictions of an alien invasion of Earth, and has influenced many others, as well as spawning several films, a radio drama and a television series based on the story.

Contents

Set in the early twentieth century, the story begins with an unnamed narrator (essentially a fictionalised version of Wells), who has been invited to an observatory in Ottershaw by a "noted astronomer" named Ogilvy. There he witnesses an explosion on the surface of the planet Mars, one of a series of such events that arouses much interest in the scientific community. An unspecified time later, a "meteor" is seen landing on Horsell Common, near London. The narrator's home is close by, and he is among the first to discover the object is a space-going artificial cylinder launched from Mars. The cylinder opens, disgorging the Martians: bulky, tentacled creatures that begin setting up strange machinery in the cylinder's impact crater. A human deputation moves towards the crater, waving a white flag of truce and is incinerated by a laser-like Heat-Ray.

A statue, erected in Woking town centre, of a tripod inspired by the book.
A statue, erected in Woking town centre, of a tripod inspired by the book.

After the attack, the narrator takes his wife to Leatherhead to stay with relatives until the Martians are killed; upon returning home, he sees firsthand what the Martians have been assembling: towering three-legged "fighting-machines" armed with the Heat-Ray and a chemical weapon: "the Black Smoke". The tripods smash through the army units now positioned around the crater and attack the surrounding communities. The narrator meets a retreating artilleryman, who tells him that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, cutting the narrator off from his wife. The two men try to escape together, but are separated during a Martian attack on Shepperton.

More cylinders land across the English countryside, and a frantic mass evacuation of London begins; among the fleeing swarms of humanity is the narrator's brother, who is thrown together with the wife and the younger sister of a man named Elphinstone; the three of them eventually gain passage on a ship, crossing the English Channel to safety. One of the tripods is destroyed in the Shepperton battle by an artillery barrage and two more are brought down in Tillingham Bay by the torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child before the vessel is sunk, but soon all organised 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 later Martian landing sites. He 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 of the attacks and whose irrational behaviour finally causes him to be discovered and dragged away by the Martians. The narrator barely avoids the same fate. 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 pathogenic bacteria, to which they have no immunity. The narrator is unexpectedly reunited with his wife, and they, along with the rest of humanity, set out to face the new and expanded view of the universe which the invasion has impressed upon them.

Martian war machines loom over the River Thames in an illustration by Warwick Goble.
Martian war machines loom over the River Thames in an illustration by Warwick Goble.

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. The Martians advance to the great city's center.
  • 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. This day also sees the sea-battle off the Blackwater estuary with the loss of the Thunder Child.
  • During Days 5 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.
  • During the night on day 21, the Martians are found dead.

In 1878, Italian astronomer, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910) observed natural features on Mars and called them canali (Italian for "channels"); this was mistranslated into the English "canals" (artificial rivers) , fuelling 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 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.

Military theorists of that era 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 before the First World War). Wells's 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 a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]

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 that "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 due to Wells' mistaken belief that the function of digestion was to convert food into blood, rather than introduce nutrients into the blood.[citation needed]

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 colonised regions than their native inhabitants. The novel challenges this perspective by conflating the justness of the Martian invasion with the colonial invasions made by European powers. Wells himself introduces this theme in the novel's first chapter:

And before we judge them [the Martians] 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 were substantially influenced to take their stance by reading Wells's book, which vividly conveys human beings' horror at becoming in effect the Martians' food animals.

The book could also be seen as a message that planet Earth was not as safe as it seemed. More broadly, this book illustrates the potential disaster that young civilisations can face in an outside context problem.

  • 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, although one might assume that it is the British army or navy attacking the tripods with artillery.
  • 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 inferred 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 that he was H. G. Wells and that his brother is Wells' brother Frank. (This goes hand in hand with The Time Machine, in which the also nameless narrator is often equated with Wells.)
  • Although the narrator states that the Martians' "queer hooting invariably preceded feeding" and was "in no sense a signal", offering an alternative in the suggestion that the Martians communicate via telepathy, during the scenes of destroyed London, the narrator refers several times to a sound written as "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla" which seems to be a cry of mourning uttered by a lone Martian.
  • In the final scene of the London Exodus, an object appears in the sky, flying overhead, and "rained down darkness upon the land". No explanation is given for this; nor is the "darkness" defined, although the suggestion is made that it is the Black Smoke or possibly the metaphorical darkness of the Martians' power. The object is usually identified as the flying-machine.

Researchers have noted the connection between Wells' book and the sub-genre known as "invasion literature" which was very common in the West - and particularly in Britain - in the decades before the First World War, and which reflected the increasing feeling of anxiety and insecurity as international tensions escalated towards the coming war.

Most such books had plots concerned with human armies invading each other's country, with British books mostly depicting German and/or French invading armies on British soil. Still, there were noted many plot similarities between Wells' book and The Battle of Dorking (1871) by George Tomkyns Chesney: in both books, a ruthless enemy makes a devastating surprise attack, with the British armed forces helpless to stop its relentless advance; and both works contain many passages written in the author's own voice which seem designed to try and shake Britons out of the complacent self-satisfaction of the Victorian age.

There are also similarities between Wells' book and the widely successful The Great War in England in 1897 published four years earlier (1894) by William Le Queux, where an invading French army penetrates to the heart of London - though Le Queux's book is written in a spirit of jingoistic nationalism opposite to Wells' tone.

The War of the Worlds has been adapted numerous times for radio, film (see The War of the Worlds (film)), TV, and video games. Often the particular adaptation will change the setting to the current time and the place to where the adaptation is made

The theme of alien invasion has remained popular ever since the story's initial publishing, some modern 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.

The idea of mecha also originated in The War of the Worlds. The AT-AT walkers in 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. Powered armour as popularised in Starship Troopers can also be traced back to The War of the Worlds; indeed, Heinlein's novel can be seen as a response to Wells'.

The War of the Worlds presents a hypothetical scenario of how humans may defeat the Martians in the speculations of a lone artilleryman encountered by the hero, who imagines a world where humanity, recognising that it cannot win through direct conflict, commences a guerrilla war. 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, whereas a nucleus of daring humans would hide out in tunnels and sewers, and would have about the same place in the Martian-dominated ecology as rats in the previous human ecology. After the passage of generations, these defiant humans would learn to duplicate the Martian weapons and destroy the invaders. The artilleryman's ambition is eventually exposed as nothing more than one man's delusion of grandeur (see megalomania) — he has no means to set about the project, and shows a complete lack of determination to complete even the simple and short-term goals that would set the rest of his plans in motion. A number of authors have, however, followed on from that theme.

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 join the last free members of humanity in their cave refuges in the mountains. John Christopher admitted (in a BBC documentary called The Cult of the Tripods) that the alien war machines were inspired, at least subconsciously, by The War of the Worlds.

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.

Along with Christopher's Tripods, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth and the 1980s television miniseries and series V are other notable examples where the story starts sometime after a successful alien invasion of Earth; instead focusing on the determination of a few humans using guerilla tactics to defeat the alien occupation and the obstacles they must face both from the aliens and fellow humans alike. In such stories, the aliens tend to get far more character development than the faceless monsters originally depicted in the Wells novel. This allows room for subplots told on both sides.

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:

War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, is an anthology of such stories (ISBN 0-553-10353-9).

Within six weeks of the novel's original 1897 magazine serialisation, the New York Journal American began running a sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss, about an Earth counter-attack against the Martians, led by Thomas Edison.

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

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 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.

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

In the 1970s, Marvel Comics had a character named Killraven Warrior of the Worlds who (in an alternative timeline) fought H. G. Wells' Martians after their second invasion of Earth in 2001. He first appeared in Amazing Adventures volume 2 #18.

The comic book Scarlet Traces begins a decade later with Great Britain utilising the Martians' technology, and ironic to the allegory of Wells' novel, have become more powerful because of it. Eventually, this leads up to a counter-invasion aimed for Mars in its own sequel, The Great Game.

In 1962, Soviet author Lasar Lagin published a political pamphlet named "Major Well Endue" ("Майор Велл Эндъю") which relates the story of a major in the British Army who collaborates with the Martian invaders. A condemnation of imperialism and capitalism, the story was dominated by Soviet analysis of political issues contemporary to the 1950s and 1960s.

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  • 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 Space Machine by Christopher Priest the plot of The War of the Worlds is connected with the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine.
  • 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 Robert Rankin's The Witches of Chiswick, the Martian invasion is about to be started with a signal by the Elephant Man.
  • Many aspects of Chicken Little are parodies of the War of the Worlds, but the weapons used were slightly toned down so the victims were not killed, but teleported to another spaceship, where the victims stayed until the baby alien was returned to its parents.
  • In Tad Williams's Otherland series Paul Jonas finds himself in the remains of London where the Martian invaders have survived.
  • In Philip Reeve's Larklight, the martians are rather surprised to be invaded by the British Empire, in a parody of the introduction to the War of the Worlds.
  • The video game Half-Life 2 by Valve Software features a tripod-like "synth" called a Strider.
  • The video game Unreal Tournament 3 by Epic Games includes a tripod-like vehicle called a Darkwalker. In addition, one of the maps on which the vehicle is featured is called "Heat Ray", in reference to the weapon used by the Tripods in the War of the Worlds.
  • In the video game command and conquer:3 The scrin faction has a unit called the tripod, It shoots bright laser beams as its primary weapon and has a similarity to H.G wells tripods.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

  • Roth, Christopher F. (2005) "Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult." In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. by Debbora Battaglia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
v • d • e
Works by H. G. Wells
Non-fiction books: H. G. Wells
Novels:
Short story collections:
Short stories:
Screenplays:
Film adaptations:
 v • d • e The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Battles Battle of Weybridge/Shepperton • Fall of London • HMS Thunder Child
Martians Black smoke • Embankment-machine • Flying-machine • Handling-machine • Heat-Ray • Red weed • Tripod
Radio The War of the Worlds • Grover's Mill, New Jersey • The Night That Panicked America
Films The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (Hines, 2005) • H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds (Latt, 2005) • War of the Worlds
Jeff Wayne Musical Version • Highlights • Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds game
TV series War of the Worlds (Mor-Tax • Mor-Taxans • list of episodes)
Sequels Edison's Conquest of Mars • Killraven (Earth-691) • Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds • War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches • Rainbow Mars • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II • War of the Worlds: New Millennium • Scarlet Traces • The Martian War
Miscellaneous Doctor Clayton Forrester • Comic • The Space Machine • Superman • Arcade game
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds"
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