The War of the Worlds

The first eight chapters of The War of the Worlds focus primarily on a single day, and yet within this period the scope and gravity of the Martian invasion become terrifyingly clear, even if the narrator has yet to appreciate them fully. This confidence in the immutability of the status quo is a persistent element in the text, evidenced by the narrator’s repeated convictions throughout much of Book 1 that the Martians are too weak and sluggish to escape the pit and that English military victory is inevitable. Blind faith of this sort is widespread and so extreme in some people that it transforms into dangerous nonchalance. When, having just witnessed the first deadly use of the Heat-Ray, the narrator asks a group he encounters on his way home what they have heard of the Martians, and one of them quips, “Quite enough” (35), a response that amuses her companions. Given the fate of the narrator’s community, these characters probably do not survive much longer, their fates far likelier to be grim due to their failure to appreciate the danger of the situation. Although modern readers now recognize a Martian invasion to be an impossibility, Wells’s characters nevertheless react in a way familiar to those who have experienced the onset of a real-life catastrophe.

If on the one hand the narrator falls prey to this misplaced confidence himself, certainly he is not as oblivious as those he encounters that night, although perhaps he would be had he not just been present for the Martians’ first massacre. The difference, then, is experience, largely due to the narrator’s immense curiosity, which is so intense that it often undoes any additional safety afforded by his increased knowledge and wariness—a tension he acknowledges early on when he describes himself as “a battleground of fear and curiosity” (25).

It is this curiosity that makes this character an ideal narrator for Wells’s story, for it brings him consistently into contact with the Martians. It also helps that he is educated enough to understand much of the science behind these phenomena, well-connected enough to be aware of and even witness the missile launches before they are widely known, and cowardly enough to avoid those “momentary impulse[s] to go back and help” that may well have gotten him killed (24). He is also a self-described “man of exceptional moods,” his explanation of which further positions him as uniquely well-suited to the narration of this calamitous story: “At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all” (34). Most crucially, the narrator lives near the early landing sites. Laid side-by-side, details like these make it clear that Wells’s narrator is first and foremost a convenient vessel for the story rather than a character whose identity and arc matter in and of themselves. Wells underscores this by leaving the man—and almost everyone in his life—unnamed, the importance of character in The War of the Worlds completely subordinate to that of plot.

Significantly, many of those few names Wells does include belong to real people. In the first chapter alone, the narrator makes reference to Giovanni Schiaparelli, Henri Perrotin, and William Frederick Denning—all actual astronomers of the day. Similarly, Wells details the geography of England with incredible precision, presenting the reader with a constant rundown of the journeys of the narrator and his brother. In doing so, Wells situates his outlandish story in a world that would have felt uncomfortably tangible to a contemporary reader. As the novel appeared in 1897, a decade or so before its events take place, these verifiable names and places would have added to readers’ fears that all of this might actually come to pass. Indeed, as fellow giant of science fiction and spiritual inheritor of Wells’s legacy Isaac Asimov explains in his afterword, Wells “thought [intelligent Martians] were at least possible” (199), an opinion shared by many intellectuals at the time. Moreover, Asimov points out that Wells’s keenly analytical mind “carried it one step further” (200), deducing that, given the apparent scarcity of water on Mars and the vast, technologically astounding network of canals, many erroneously believed had been built there to mitigate this scarcity, there was a strong possibility that life on Mars would be advanced enough—and desperate enough—to invade Earth.

The War of the Worlds, then, is no mere whimsical fantasy. If Wells thought there were even the faintest of possibilities that Martians might attack Earth, then he likely felt duty-bound to produce this text as a cautionary tale. Moreover, Wells presents the miraculous and unexpected defeat of the Martians—possible only in the very uncertain event that these invading aliens lack immune systems—in a manner that implies that even this astounding victory is not without irrevocable detriment for humanity. The narrator, writing for an audience painfully familiar with the consequences of the Martian invasion, hints at these repercussions in the novel’s famous opening paragraph: “With infinite complacency men went to and fro over the globe about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their empire over matter. […] It is curious to recall the mental habits of those departed days” (5). More ominously, the narrator reveals offhandedly in Chapter 7 that “in those days even philosophical writers had many little luxuries” (36), neatly revealing the more desperate state of affairs that Wells predicts would follow even a successful encounter with hostile aliens.

While a Martian invasion did not come to pass, Wells’s story remains illustrative for the myriad disasters that humanity has endured in the decades since the novel’s publication. Notably, it was just this sort of terrestrial crisis that was Wells’s inspiration for the tale. Wells came up with the idea from a conversation with his brother Frank about the British devastation of the indigenous population of Tasmania, which they compared to a Martian invasion of England (Gruber, Fiona. “War of the Worlds: The Pioneering Work of Science Fiction Inspired by Australian Brutality.” The Guardian, 13 Jul. 2020). Wells’s narrator repeatedly draws this connection himself, including in the first chapter:

And before we judge of [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? (7).

Wells’s characterization of the Tasmanians as “inferior races” is of course highly problematic, and it raises questions as to the cultural sensitivity of the allegory as a whole. For colonialism to be seen through this lens, we must on some level believe that the differences between Europeans and those they subjugated are so vast as to render them different species, a perspective implied in the narrator’s clarification that colonists exterminated the Tasmanians “in spite of their human likeness.” This dimension becomes even more concerning given Wells’s personal belief in racial hierarchy and support for eugenics (Kirsch, Adam. “Utopian Pessimist.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 10 Oct. 2011), and it raises concerns as to whether Wells may have been suggesting in this novel that the terrors of colonialism, reprehensible or not, were necessary and proper.

However, it is also worth noting what great pains Wells goes to make his Martians monstrous, even acknowledging that such a manifestation violates the expectations of those who first witness the creatures: “I think everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man” (22). The actual appearance he gives the Martians, then, stands in stark contrast not just to this expectation but also to the racist diminishment implied of Tasmanians. The narrator uses many negative descriptors to characterize the octopus-like aliens—he calls them “crippled and monstrous,” speaks of “the strange horror of their appearance,” describes their skin as “fungoid,” and declares that on first sight he “was overcome with disgust and dread”—but nothing is more telling here than his labeling of them as “inhuman” (23). These creatures, toward which the narrator will suggest in Chapter 2 of Book 2 that humans are evolving, are Wells’s allegorical stand-in for imperial Europeans. While the overall framework remains tinged with racism, it is redeemed in part by the fact that the indigenous peoples whom Europeans victimized are the humans in this story, while the greedy, manipulative colonizers are presented as monstrous and dreadful freaks.