Trivia / The War of the Worlds (1898)

• Ascended Fanon: Most info on Martian technology, such as their power plants and motors come from a document titled A Report on Martian Technology, written long afterwards (1999-ish). It purports that the Martians have portable nuclear reactors and artificial muscles utilizing room-temperature superconductors, and the green exhaust their walkers occasionally release is an easily-plasmatized gas they use to generate electricity. Flying Machine hulls are also apparently plated in Cavorite.
• Referenced by...: The Mars People from Metal Slug are lifted wholesale from the book's description of Martians, minus the huge, "V" shaped mouth and Vader Breath (ie, sapent, land-lubbing octopi with giant robots).
• Science Marches On:
  • At the very least, there's no Martian civilization invading Earth, and much of the speculation about how the Martians' technology and biology works is based on outdated science. Wells does future-proof the story to some extent, though, by constantly stating that the characters' scientific speculation is just that, and they could be entirely wrong.
  • In some ways that makes our technological advancement over the last 100 years or so quite scary. These machines were pretty much the most deadly things that the author could think up, and yet put them against modern weapons and they would be obliterated in seconds.
  • The Martians' main advantage is that their weapon is point-and-shoot accurate, whereas artillery of the day required that the target be 'bracketed' in order to reliably place fire on the target. So the artillery would open up with their initial shots to try and find the range, and the Martian Heat-Ray would immediately and accurately destroy them. The Thunder Child was so effective because it closed to point-blank range before opening fire.
  • The Martians are described lacking a true digestive system, instead draining blood from other creatures and replacing their own with it, thus gaining the necessary nutrients. Needless to say, the understanding of blood transfusions hadn't developed very far when the book was written. And there's also the issue of No Biochemical Barriers, although they did all die from interaction with Earth's ecosystem....
• Technology Marches On:
  • The awe that the humans experience upon seeing the Martian flying machine is somewhat dated, especially considering that human flight would be achieved within the next 5 years. In contrast, every other piece of technology the Martians use has aged surprisingly well, as walking machines and directed energy weapons, though beginning to appear in real life, have yet to become subject to the industrial precision and mass-production shown in the novel. One big exception is their defenses, or lack thereof; while they move fast enough to be hard targets for British artillery, any shell that actually connects will destroy one.
  • The scene where the protagonist describes the Martians' aluminium refining technology. A modern reader may think "So what? Big deal". At the time the book was written, however, aluminium was extremely difficult and expensive to mass-produce, it was even considered to be a precious metal with a higher value than gold, so being able to mass-produce it was used as proof of the Martians' technological mastery.
• Write What You Know: H.G. Wells was a biologist and a staunch adherent of Charles Darwin's ideas. As such, what solves the conflict of the novel is not any kind of human ingenuity, but rather everyday natural selection working its course.

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