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alt title(s): War Of The Worlds
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
So begins
The War of the Worlds by
H. G. Wells, the first alien invasion story, and perhaps the best known, in which late-Victorian England, then homeland of the world's greatest empire, was conquered with casual ease by
Martians. Only chance saved them.
The story begins with the
nameless narrator, a lightly disguised
version of Wells, visiting an observatory, where he is shown explosions of the surface of Mars. Shortly afterwards, an apparent meteor lands close to the narrator's house. When he goes to look, he sees the first of the Martians emerging from its spacecraft. They swiftly set up strange machinery, incinerating all humans who approach.
The narrator sends his wife to presumed safety then returns just in time to witness gigantic tripods,
Martian war machines, smashing their way through the massed ranks of the British Army. Three tripods are brought down in a succession of battles before the army and navy are routed, and more Martians are still landing, reinforcing the invaders.
A few are making grandiose plans for resistance, but it is clear they have no prospect of success. Great Britain has been utterly defeated. All the narrator can do is hide in the ruins near a Martian base, where he gets a first hand view of the aliens drinking human blood. It seems they intend to treat humanity as nothing more than food.
At this point, when the full consequences of defeat have become apparent, the Martians disappear. Returning to London, the narrator finds that all the Martians have conveniently dropped dead, killed by some terrestrial microbe.
There have been several movie versions of this story, as well as the notorious
Radio Drama, a
TV series, and, of all things, a
Rock Opera. It has also influenced many subsequent alien invasion stories.
Interestingly, the novel was originally considered part of a different genre - the "Invasion Story", of which there was a spate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, depicting fictional invasions or invasion plans of the author's home country, usually by German or Crypto-German forces. Only later did the "alien" part of "alien invasion" come to be considered more defining than the "invasion" part.
The novel is generally regarded as an allegory of colonialism, depicting Great Britain receiving the same kind of treatment as it had been delivering to the natives of its empire. (Metaphorically. Englishmen did not usually drink human blood.)
For the television series, see
War Of The Worlds.
This novel provides examples of:
- Adaptation Decay — The motives of the Martian invaders, and the colonial allegory, are largely ignored in many adaptations, and the 2005 film even neglects to mention that they're from Mars. Likewise, the Thunder Child scene, the sole military triumph of the humans over the Martians, is almost always excised. Which is sad, as it tends to be a Crowning Moment Of Awesome when it's included.
- Aliens And Monsters
- Author Avatar (although Wells is mentioned as a separate person: see Mythology Gag, below)
- Chekhovs Gun — Midway through the story, the narrator describes certain things that the humans have since learned about the Martians - among them, that they are/were vulnerable to terrestrial germs...
- Cool Plane — the 1953 movie features Stock Footage of the canceled YB-49 bomber
. If the "flying wing" design reminds you of something, you're right. The basic principle was re-used for the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.
- Creator Provincialism — There is no mention of what happened outside south-east England. Many authors have written stories describing events that unfolded in other parts of the world - Kevin J. Anderson's War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches is a compilation of some of the best. Note that in the novel it is more or less explicitly stated that England was the only target of the Martians.
- Death Ray — The Martian "Heat Ray".
- Deus Ex Machina — After all but winning, the Martians catch their death of cold.
- Foreshadowing — The red weed dies off not long before the Martians do.
- Forgotten Trope — War of the Worlds was actually a Science Fiction twist on the then-vibrant genre of the "Invasion Story".
- Ghost City
- Humongous Mecha — The towering Martian tripods are one of the first appearances of this in fiction, if not THE first appearance.
- That depends on whether you count Hindu mythology as "fiction".
- Mythology Gag — During the sequence where the narrator is watching the Martians from the ruins, he comments that they remind him of an essay he once read about how humans might evolve in a technology-dominated future, by some chap whose name he can't quite remember. The essay actually existed, and was used by Wells as the basis for the Martians' biology; its author was Wells himself.
- No Name Given — for the movie, he was given the name of "Dr Clayton Forrester" (Yes, that's where it came from).
- Not So Invincible After All — After shrugging off everything humans can throw at them, the aliens die of some minor Earth disease their immune systems weren't familiar with.
- Plant Aliens — The red weed grown (or at least imported) by the Martians.
- Rock Opera — Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds
- Science Marches On — The book is based on two scientific theories popular at the time, both since discredited:
- Firstly, and most obviously, that Mars has "canals", artificial waterways, visible from Earth. This suggests a vast and advanced civilization. Apparently this all came about when an Italian astronomer saw what he called "canale" - "Channels", meaning natural rock formations that looked like rivers. The English press then got the translation wrong.
- Secondly, that the digestive system actually converts food into blood for the circulatory system. This explains why the Martians feed in the way they do - bypassing the mouth to mainline blood straight into their own system.
- Also, the idea of the invaders being wiped out by terrestrial diseases has been shown to be fairly unlikely. It would be outright impossible for a virus, since viruses have a difficult enough time jumping between terrestrial species, let alone aliens. Pathogenic bacteria of some sort are within the realm of possibility, but still unlikely, considering that an civilization as advanced as the Martians should be able to prevent such an outbreak from getting so bad.
- It could have been that the bacteria that built up on and in their bodies, being unknown to their immune system, was treated as a foreign substance such as dirt, and their immune systems just worked themselves to death, meaning that any microbes that they brought with them in the cylinders, or any microbe that managed to adapt itself to attack the martialns would have no trouble doing damage as their entire immune system if not dead would be fending off and trying to remove the countless different types of bacteria that line every exposed organic surface on earth.
- Spiritual Successor — The Tripod series, a series of young-adult novels by John Christopher, is in all but name a sequel set in an Alternate Continuity where the Martians were successful in dominating the world.
- The Theme Park Version — In the novel, humans manage a few isolated successes against individual Martian tripods, and there are mentions of damaged tripods. By the 1938 radio play, we are explicitly told that the Martians lose only one machine. By the 1953 film, the war machines are totally indestructable, and even an atomic bomb fails to put so much as a scratch on them. Arguably this an unavoidable part of technology lag - in 1898 the most powerful weapons around were the big guns of the Royal Navy, the difference between such a weapon and a field artillery piece being one of scale. Conversely by 1953 atomic weapons are orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional explosives: the limited effectiveness of certain weapons of the earlier adaptations becomes impossible. Either the Martians are, however marginally, at risk from conventional attacks or they are utterly immune.
