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Invasion Literature
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
BY
HG Wells
Illustrated version
(first published 1898 )
But who shall dwell in
these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords
of the
World? . . . And how are all things
made for man?--
KEPLER (quoted in The
Anatomy of Melancholy)
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The book that made HG Wells’s reputation was, without
question, The War of the Worlds. The book has never
been out of print since 1898. It has been adapted for all forms of media,
most notoriously Orson Welles’s radio broadcast in 1938, which caused panic
and hysteria in parts of New York and New Jersey, and most recently Steven
Spielberg’s film version. Although now over a hundred
years old, it never fails to attract, entertain, even repel its readers,
because its theme of invasion by a superior and seemingly invincible enemy
is as relevant today as it has ever been.
It was that reason – the fear by the British of the growing power and
superiority of the German war machine – that made the story so effective
when it first appeared and it is worth spending some time looking not only
at the book’s publication history but also at the context in which the story
first appeared and the fascinating and collectable area of British invasion
stories.
Wells later revealed the origin of the story. He and his brother Frank had
been strolling through the Surrey countryside when Frank remarked, ‘Suppose
some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly and
began laying about them here!’ The idea clearly attracted Wells as a way of
jogging the public into an awareness of the potential perils at hand. His
comments are worth reproducing:
Tragedy, people thought, had gone out of human life for ever. A few of us
were trying to point out the obvious possibilities of flying, of great guns,
of poison gas, and so forth in presently making life uncomfortable if some
sort of world peace was not assured, but the books we wrote were regarded as
the silliest of imaginative gymnastics. Well, the world knows better now.
Wells is talking about the first generation of ‘weapons of mass destruction’
to which he and a few fellow writers such as George Griffith, Louis Tracy,
Max Pemberton and William Le Queux were trying to alert public and
politicians alike. As always, much falls on deaf ears, but we may reckon The
War of the Worlds as the point at which people started to listen.
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There was a specific event that inspired
Wells. In 1894 Mars was positioned particularly closely to Earth, leading to
a great deal of observation and discussion. Italian astronomer Giovanni
Schiaparelli had reported seeing "canali" on Mars, meaning "channels," but
the term was mistranslated as "canals," leading to much speculation about
life on the red planet. [Although scientists were able eventually to
photograph what seem to be large stream beds on Mars, these are on a much
smaller scale than the blobs and blotches which misled Schiaparelli into
thinking he had seen channels.] One of the 1894 observers, a M. Javelle of
Nice, claimed to have seen a strange light on Mars, which further stimulated
speculation about life there.
Wells became famous partly as a prophet. In various writings he predicted
tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, and--in this novel--gas warfare,
laser-like weapons, and industrial robots. It was his tragedy that his most
successful predictions were of destructive technologies, and that he lived
to experience the opening of the atomic age in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wells was to become famous as a socialist and a utopian, but his science
fiction novels are almost uniformly pessimistic about human nature and the
future.
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