MARTIAN LANDINGS
In 1938 the actor Orson Welles, who would make his name directing the black and white movie masterpiece Citizen Kane, spooked America with a terrifying radio adaptation of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. His depiction of a Martian invasion of earth as a real-time news event, exploited the gullibility of the public and boosted the sales of an author whose reputation in his later years was on the decline.
Today HG Wells (1866 -1946) is lauded as one of the fathers of science fiction, a status cemented by the TV and film adaptations of his novels and the publication of The War of the Worlds sequel, The Massacre of Mankind by Terry Pratchett collaborator Stephen Baxter. All of which begs the question why has this book never been out of print since it was serialised in 1897? It’s a difficult question to answer although the number of alleged UFO sightings over the years (a hundred thousand at the last count), along with (unproven) claims of a government contingency plan in the event of an alien landing, might have something to do with it! Having said that I suspect the ordinariness of the story setting is probably the single most compelling explanation for the book’s enduring popularity. Bad things can and often do happen in even the safest places.
Wells’ Martians launch their violent invasion from Horsell Common in Woking, Surrey where one of their pods unexpectedly lands in a sandpit. From there the creatures rise-up to bring havoc to the county, blasting and tramping their way through Byfleet, Weybridge, Shepperton, Leatherhead, Richmond and beyond, places that would have been familiar to Wells’ readers. Nothing is spared as these towering tripod monsters with their “Gorgon groups of tentacles” and eyes of frightening intensity, annihilate the living with heat rays and poisonous jets of black smoke. Was Wells referencing a future when chemical weapons would form the staple of modern warfare? It’s a tempting thought since the novel was published seventeen years before the First World War which witnessed the large-scale use of phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gases.
Humanity is forced to go on the run as the Martians doggedly pursue their mission of colonisation. All of this is told in chillingly forensic detail by a nameless narrator who is searching for his wife in the melee. In the confusion and fear that unfolds around him he encounters homeless, desperate, and hungry refugees. The barriers of wealth, religion and class that had once divided them are irrelevant: in this new world order it is every man for himself. Government is broken: food is scarce: information is distributed by word of mouth: humans are little more than sad, pathetic creatures salvaging what they can of their battered dignity. The narrator, a man of philosophy and reason, struggles to keep his sanity while others around him are losing theirs. As he heads towards London, he meets a traumatised curate who becomes an unwanted travelling companion. The curate’s mind wanders between fleeting moments of stability and prolonged bouts of manic, ranting hysteria. He is a dangerous liability who threatens the narrator’s survival. It is fate that eventually deals with him.
Wells’ vision of an earth plunged into extreme hopelessness is broken when the Martians are destroyed by the microbe infections against which humanity is immune. The world they almost annihilated is left to repair itself and as the narrator watches the process take shape, he can only wonder if the Martians might be tempted to try their luck again.
The War of the Worlds is a powerful story written with the pace and reflectiveness of a news report. In Wells’ imagination the Martians are the symbol of humanity’s destructive nature, putting them on the same level as the “European immigrants” who “in the space of fifty years” decimated “the Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness”. In which case the occupants of the red planet came close to giving mankind a taste of its own medicine.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
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