The War of the Worlds

"Yes. The War of the Worlds explicitly states this in its famous opening pages. Again, it is something we need to understand in context: it is not just a science fiction novel, it is part of the ‘invasion’ genre. It is one of thousands of invasion novels that were written from the 1870s onwards, which nearly always featured an anxiety about invasion from the European continent. Usually it was the ‘damned Germans’, who under Bismarck were becoming a rival imperial power and had entered an arms race with England. These cunning blighters were going to come through and overrun England. For example, there was a very famous book of 1871 called The Battle of Dorking , in which the Germans—rather wonderfully—turn Dorking into a staging-post for their invasion. The fear prompted massive spending on military arms and new technology in the late Victorian period. It would culminate in the Great War of 1914-18. What Wells does is take that idea of invasion fantasy but give it an astronomical scale. He turns it into what we would understand as a science fictional invasion. In terms of science, Wells was also picking up on various phenomena like a contemporary obsession with Mars. An astronomer in the 1870s called the markings seen through powerful new telescopes on Mars ‘canali’. People misunderstood this as ‘canals’, and jumped to the conclusion there could actually be intelligent creatures on Mars. They thought: what the hell are they going to do to us now? Are they more advanced? Are they as belligerent as humans? Will they invade? “Wells takes that idea of invasion fantasy but gives it an astronomical scale” The 1890s is a period famous for imperial expansion: for the ‘Scramble for Africa’, where the European empires agreed to divide up the terrain of Africa amongst themselves in an effort to avoid war. England annexed several dozen territories, and went to war in South Africa to defend its raw materials and strategic gains. In England, this is the era of the jingoes—and the ideology of jingoism. This was the passionate ideological commitment to create a ‘Greater Britain’ that would be a global empire. Right at the beginning of the novel, Wells’s narrator challenges the idea that England in 1898, with its massive empire, is the top of the political and evolutionary scale. What if you turned it around and we were in fact the equivalent of the Tasmanians—a group of aboriginal people who had been notoriously eliminated by the arrival of British colonists? What if there were an even more intelligent race that were looking at us and thinking in their cold intellectual cruelty that they could take everything, all of our possessions? That is Wells’s brilliant satirical stroke of turning colonialism on its head. Again, Wells is not the first person to do this by a long way, but he is a very good reference point for the idea of a Martian invasion. Very soon after him, you see lots of stories about this. It is a good measure of the difference between American science fiction and the British scientific romance that, when The War of the Worlds came out, the American writer Garrett Serviss read it and was so horrified at the human failure to get back at the Martians, that he wrote a book the following year called The Conquest of Mars . In this book, the human race gets together behind the great inventor Thomas Edison. They build a giant gun to fire rockets at Mars, take the fight to the red planet and inevitably kick their over-refined asses. This is the ‘engineer’ paradigm. Where British science fiction can often depict scenes of devastation, collapse and decline, the American science fiction of the pulps—Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers—sets out with a ‘can do’ attitude to fix things. It’s still there to some extent. In The Martian , Ridley Scott’s film that came out recently based on the Andy Weir novel, the protagonist is a scientist who gets stranded on Mars, but he survives by improvising solutions to problems. It is classic American science fiction."