It’s fascinating to see an original idea play out in a novel. I suppose that’s one of the advantages of reading older books. In science fiction, it’s particularly interesting. In The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, you get to see one of the first–if not the first–alien invasion stories. What surprised me most about this book is that, aside from the weaponry, was how contemporary it felt. I’m not sure whether to compliment Wells on his style, or to lament the fact that people haven’t changed much in the last 110-odd years.
The action in The War of the Worlds kicks off right away. There are a few hints from astronomers that something strange is happening on Mars. Then, our narrator, a speculative philosopher, is working one morning when a cylinder from another world crashes into a nearby field. People gather from miles around the see the extraterrestrial ship, curious as monkeys. But things go bad as soon as the hatch opens and the Martians start incinerating people left and right. Things play out much as they do in every disaster story since. People panic. The enemy has overwhelming technology and nothing we seem to do can stop them marching right over us. The fact that the novel mostly takes place in the rural English countryside makes it all the more disturbing.
For most of the book, our narrator wanders around, hiding from the Martians and trying–not very successfully–to get back to his wife. The more I read, the more it became clear that this book is not so much about the plot as it is about the idea of alien invaders. The narrator, like any good philosopher, spends a lot of time thinking about what the invasion means for humanity and what the motivations of the aliens are. If I hadn’t read The Time Machine so recently, I might have missed how the narrator makes use of Darwin’s ideas of evolution and natural selection. In fact, having read The Time Machine, I speculate that evolution really captured Wells’ imagination and that, to a certain extent, Wells is using his characters as mouthpieces to explore the idea much further than biologists would have.
The narrator speculates on the invader’s biology. The creatures seem to be nothing more than mobile brains. They’d don’t speak. They don’t have much as far as bodies are concerned; they have just enough appendages to manipulate objects and to get around. To make them even more horrifying, it turns out that they’re vampires and feed off of the blood of humans and other animals. The narrator suggests that these creatures–like the Eloi and the Morlocks of The Time Machine–are near the end of the evolutionary arc as a species. He thinks that they have nothing left to adapt to. I don’t buy the science of this idea, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. I don’t like it because it presumes that a) there can be an endpoint to evolution and b) there’s an ideal lifeform. If environments are always in flux, organisms can’t stop adapting. Even if environments reach an equilibrium, there’s still natural selection to contend with.
The other thing that bothers me about the science of this novel is the bacteria. This book was published in1898, so I’m not too worried about spoilers at this point. But, if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know how the story ends, skip down to the next paragraph. By the end of the book, things seem hopeless for humanity. Nothing they do is making a dent in the invading force. What ends up killing off the Martians are terrestrial diseases. The narrator claims that there are no bacteria on Mars. I would argue, in the context of this book, that if a planet can support as complex a critter as these Martians, it can support durable bacteria. But I will accept that the Martians have no resistance to our bacteria, because they haven’t been exposed to them. A more modern alien invasion story might have had the humans come up with a daring plan that took out the aliens. But in The War of the Worlds, without the humble bacteria, the Martians would have one. It’s a little anti-climactic, to be honest. It might just be my American way of looking at things, but I want a hero (preferably composed of more than one cell) and a big fight.
What I really liked about this novel was its originality and its punchy, journalistic style. Aside from the narrator’s musings, the novel is told in a just-the-facts manner that lets you sink easily into this wild story. The narrator provides an on-the-spot perspective that keeps you right in the action. At any moment, the narrator could stumble across some new horror. I’ve read a lot of apocalyptic and end-of-the-world novels and now I realize that all of them owe a debt to H.G. Wells. They follow the pattern he set. First, there are warnings. Then the event happens. There’s a panic and everything seems hopeless, until a hero steps forward or a solution presents itself. Scholars talk about influence, but I’ve never seen it so clearly as when I read The War of the Worlds. Wells casts a long shadow over science fiction and horror.
The War of the Worlds could have been written yesterday; that’s how fresh and original it feels. It’s amazing how long a good novel, a good story, can stick around.