The War of the Worlds

I'm a sucker for alien invasion stories, but I had not until now read this one, the mother of them all. It's a fine novel: well written and plotted, providing plenty of food for thought without beating you over the head with it.

It is indeed a book about a war, and there are vivid battle scenes, especially in the first half, but it is really more an exodus story, describing in gripping detail the chaos and cruelty as people are driven forward by the oncoming Martian death machines. And as the story moves into its final third, it becomes a journey through a post-apocalyptic hell, with our unnamed protagonist and narrator wondering whether he might not be the last man on Earth.

The scientific elements of the book are remarkably good, given that it was published in 1897. Wells was a committed Darwinian; his Martians have managed to develop capacities well beyond those of humans thanks to a longer period of evolution and the selective pressures of the more challenging conditions on their native planet. Yet smart as they are, the Martians fail to anticipate the problem posed by terrestrial pathogens, which proves to be their undoing. Our narrator speculates that back on Mars, they had long ago solved the problem of disease. But surely they cannot have eliminated all microorganisms! It was fortuitous for humans that they did not bring with them their own killing germs along with their guns and steel.

The Martians are also post-sexual and reproduce by budding, allowing them to avoid the inefficiencies and emotional baggage that plague our own sexed-up method. How they managed to continue to evolve without the genetic randomization provided by sexual reproduction is not explained. Most likely an intelligent, advanced species like theirs would have been using CRISPR and gene drives to engineer themselves. Wells, writing pre-double helix, could hardly be expected to have come up with that kind of outlandish scenario.

The book is quite fair-minded about the Martians. To them, we humans are a handy food source on what seems to be a pretty darn livable planet. "The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us," observes the narrator, "but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit." Indeed, one of the narrator's interlocutors, the artilleryman, figures that the Martians intend to domesticate and raise the humans like sheep, and that the average sheep-like human might not find such an existence all that disagreeable.

Upon finishing the book, I re-watched the Spielberg movie, starring Tom Cruise and a bug-eyed, high-pitched Dakota Fanning. The film is quite true to the novel in most respects, right down to the protagonist's fight with the curate, although the tone is more action film than philosophical drama. Of course, it being Spielberg, there's also a broken family to be fixed.

Spielberg's Martians, whose big heads and long, knobby fingers suggest some common ancestry with ET, are more agile than Wells's gravity-bound, sluggish creatures. Although Wells provides descriptions of the Martians themselves, it's clear that he is much more taken with their various machines and devices. It's hardly surprising. Darwin was in the air by the 1890s, but it was the machine age, and it must have been logical to think of future progress in terms of more powerful, capable devices and the means of building them. Those spindly, three-legged killing machines, with their dextrous tentacles and deadly ray-beams and poison gas, are the archetype for sci-fi killing machines and nasty robots up to the present day.

The book hints that the Martians may have sent another crew to Venus, no doubt a much less hospitable joint, which raises the possibility of more trouble ahead for us earthlings. One difference between then and now is that nowadays this prospect would be a clear signal of a sequel, but Wells refrained from writing it. Too bad for us.