War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Notes, Nods, and Aha Moments

I am the proud owner of a library card from the Prague National Library where you can check out books for a month. So, since I’m like a fish out of water without a book in my hand, I check out four books each time - a book a week. Not tomes. Who can read War and Peace or the Count of Monte Cristo in a week?

This week’s book was War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells because as I stood in the small English language stacks, I realized I had never actually read it. The Time Machine. Yes. The Island of Dr. Moreau. Saw the movie. Others on the list still new to me. But this one, I could read and to be fair it was this blurb on the back that got me….

“For a time I believed man had been wiped out of existence…”

And it has occurred to me over the last eight weeks of reading how much writers can predict and I don’t mean when there’s writing on the wall, but when what’s observed and time to think come together to create magic.

War of the Worlds is Wells’ imagining of man versus machine with the invaders being that of Martians in machines and heat-ray guns that can destroy in seconds. In internet descriptions, it has been summarized as an exploration of alien invasion and the potential for space exploration.

But I don’t think that’s all it’s about and fear that many may miss the bigger picture. It is also about human resilience and nature. In reading, I came across everything from machine as extension of man to climate change utilizing the Martian as character and villain while humans fought and died for their independence from invasion. Think Independence Day - the idea came from somewhere, right?

After several jaw dropping passages that brought to mind current trends and events (barring any direct Martian activity), I started tucking sticky notes at passages that caught my attention.

The harbingers of the war in their machines are Martians described in detail on more than one occasion in the book with particular focus on the machines. But this one, intended to be the facetious description of a Martian, gave me pause.

“….that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs, the perfection of chemical devices, digestion - that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, chin, were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution in the coming ages. …Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, ‘teacher and agent of the brain.’ While the rest of the body dwindled, the hand would grow larger.”

Remind you of anything?

This, too, feels prescient. “But he was one of those weak creatures full of a shifty cunning— who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls.”

In this passage, a strange hope. “And, scattered about it, some in their overturned war machines, some in the now rigid Handling Machines, and a dozen of them dark and silent, and laid in a row, were the Martians - dead! - slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared.” Nature prevails against all odds. Against man. Against machine.

H.G. Wells is considered the godfather of science fiction, though he preferred to call his stories ‘scientific romances,’ and I wondered why. His version of romance isn’t someone meet someone, so I like to believe it’s about love and understanding of humanity for humanity’s sake. A philosophical exercise played out in what ifs. It was this final passage that made me consider this is what he meant by scientific romance.

“We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonwealth of mankind.”

Have you read War of the Worlds? Other books by H.G. Wells? What did you think? Now that Science Fiction isn’t so much fiction anymore (or is it just me that feels that way), perhaps we should return to the late 19th century genre of H.G. Wells and call it ‘scientific romance’ as he once did. The romance of the unknown. The romance of possibility.