Book Review: The War of the Worlds
The classic early first contact story by H.G. Wells.
On Monday nights, fellow author, Drew Wagar runs a Twitch livestream all about science fiction, fantasy and writing. At the end of 2022, he had the idea to use the streams as a sort-of book club, where we would collectively look at old (public domain) sci-fi novels. Our first piece of “homework” was to read some of H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds if we hadn’t already read it. I’d personally never read it, though I was familiar generally with the story from movies and TV. So I downloaded a copy and started reading. The streams have now moved on to other books - The Time Machine, Flatland, and Frankenstein, at the time of writing, but I continued reading The War of the Worlds anyway - mainly because I can’t read one whole book per week! And also because I was enjoying it. So, here’s my review… Beware: major spoilers. I don’t normally talk spoilers, but this book is 125 years old and so ingrained in the our culture at this point that I think I’m safe to talk openly about it!
Blurb
Fascinated and exhilarated, the local people approach the mysterious object armed with nothing more than a white flag. But when gruesome alien creatures emerge armed with all-destroying heat-rays, their rashness turns rapidly to fear.
Review
It’s surprising how well The War of the Worlds holds up today, given that it’s 125 years old, and written within a vastly different culture with different sensibilities and understandings of the natural world. It’s certainly a classic for a reason. Right off the bat it’s a rather unusual book for a modern reader. The War of the Worlds is written in journalistic style whereby the unnamed narrator is recounting his experiences as though speaking directly to the reader after the fact - it seems to have been a popular style around the 18th and 19th centuries, but isn’t nearly so common now. Typical of the time, there’s also a lot of waffle: over-explanations and clarifications. The Time Machine - one of Wells’ earlier novels - suffers to a far greater degree from this, but The War of the Worlds still has the long opening section where the narrator feels the need to explain the book’s concepts to the reader in a sort-of detailed treatise before launching into the plot, lest his Victorian audience become sceptical, perhaps. It’s done very poorly in The Time Machine, but is actually quite compelling here with the classic opening line: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watching keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own…” As for the science in the opening treatise, it’s not bad, all things considered. There’s a good explanation of how life could have arisen on Mars, and while we as modern readers know that Mars today is totally devoid of life, it’s plausible enough to draw you in. And it works remarkably well as a scathing social criticism, posing the question: “What if we (the British Empire in this context) got a taste of our own medicine?”
The only thing that didn’t work for me, scientifically speaking, was the description of the manner in which the Martians came to Earth - Carefully calculated Hohmann transfer orbits are small-brain thinking; the Martians just used a massive gun. Still, I can’t be too harsh on Wells here, since rocket-science wasn’t even a twinkle, and he was writing six years or so before the first heavier-than-air flight, even.
Once we get into the plot and the Martian cylinders start falling to Earth, things get very interesting indeed. There were some oddities, such as the narrator deciding that the first cylinder - which hadn’t yet opened - isn’t going anywhere, so he just goes home. Particularly amusing was how, when the narrator went out of the house without his hat, his neighbours thought he’d totally lost the plot. Possibly a good insight into cultural norms at the end 19th century. But the author writes the curiosity of the townsfolk very well, and the slow spread of information was fascinating. When things start moving, they start moving very quickly, and the news cycle of the 19th century cannot keep up. So you have people fleeing the Martian fighting machines, which have razed several towns to the ground at this point with their heat rays, going into areas where most people still believe lumbering, sluggish creatures which initially emerged from the cylinders pose no threat.
The Martian heat ray is up there with some of the best bits of predictive sci-fi I’ve ever read. It must have been strange and wonderful to the readers of the time - a fantastical, imaginative device, and possibly something which struck them as totally improbable. Modern-day readers, however, will recognise the heat-ray as a conception of an extremely powerful infrared laser - something which wouldn’t be invented for another sixty-five years. Is this the first use of a directed energy weapon in fiction, and the genesis of sci-fi’s longstanding love affair with energy beams?
The pacing of The War of the Worlds does slow down considerably in places, as we’re taken on a journey across London with the narrator as the situation gets progressively worse. The depiction of panic, civil unrest, is brilliant, as is the speed at which people abandon their “civilised” sensibilities and propriety. We even semi-switch POVs in places where the narrator begins telling the reader about what his (unnamed) brother saw. Much of this mid-section can be a bit of a drag, as there’s a lot of unnecessary repetition, and the characters themselves aren’t fleshed out in the slightest, so I didn’t much care for what they were going through outside of the big set-pieces. In the brother’s account, however, we do get the fantastic last assault of the Thunder Child, an ironclad torpedo ram warship as she heroically takes down two Martian fighting machines before succumbing to the heat ray. This is one of the best parts of the book, by far.
In part two of the book, we see a lot more of the mental and emotional toll the events take on the narrator and surrounding characters. Again, it’s a bit on the dull side because of the pacing, but I think overall the book is stronger for showing this impact.
Here’s where I want to talk about the famous - or infamous - conclusion that has been aped, referenced and criticised over and over again: the fate of the Martians. Before I read this book, I was under the impression that the Martians all died due to the common cold, and I’ve grown up with people saying it’s a dumb ending because of how advanced they were; if they had been watching us keenly and closely all this time, surely they’d be aware of viruses. But no! No, that’s not what happens! They die because of bacteria - specifically putrefying bacteria, the kind that breaks down dead flesh, and from which all living things on Earth have a measure of immunity while still alive. It is explained very well that the Martians have no conception whatsoever of micro-organisms, because Mars is totally devoid of bacterial life. It’s not something they would have looked for on Earth even if they had the technology to watch us that closely (and that’s not the case either, it’s likely Wells imagined them looking at us through telescopes the same way 19th century astronomers looked at Mars). When they come to Earth, the putrefying bacteria which is present on every surface on the planet, recognised the Martians not as living things, but as dead flesh for their consumption. And so the Martians rot and decompose. It’s a very smart ending, in my opinion (though, you could poke a hole in the idea of life arising on Mars without the presence of micro-organisms, but I feel like that’s quibbling).
Anyway, to reiterate, it’s a remarkable book that holds up surprisingly well, and if you haven’t ever read it for yourself, I encourage you to do so - even if you’ve seen one of the countless adaptations already.
