War of the Worlds (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  Conscious that the industrial revolution had utterly transformed Europe, Wells became obsessed with the idea that society too could be made into a smoothly functioning, efficient, and productive machine. Aware, as relatively few were, of socialism, Wells was convinced that a new and better social order could be devised, though he did not believe in the “workers’ paradise” utopia promised by Karl Marx (1818-1883). In fact, the nightmare future of The Time Machine (1895) is Wells’s version of that Marxist utopia, a world where the former workers (the Morlocks) eat the former capitalist class (the Eloi). Wells distrusted utopias precisely because he believed they deprive humanity of goals and render it complacent and, ultimately, stupid. His solution was unremitting work, production, and competition.

  Wells realized he was living in an age of transition and concluded that industrialization would invalidate traditional forms of government—from monarchy to democracy—but he was only too aware that technological advances would occur much more rapidly than would social evolution, that an undisciplined, anarchic humanity equipped with modern machines would be like a child playing with a loaded pistol. All of his writing has, then, a double focus: On the one hand, it points out the shortcomings of the current age, while on the other, it seeks to orient the present in the direction the author deems proper. So Wells is something very different from a prophet, who tells what the future will be: He is a social planner who offers a model of what it should be.

  The differences between England in the late-nineteenth century—especially its last five years, when Wells produced The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Wheels of Chance (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), along with myriad short stories and journalistic essays—and England after World War I are radical. From today’s perspective, England in 1895 is an only partially modern country: There was gas for lighting, at least in municipal areas, and a rail network that connected the entire country. This meant that while Wells could get to London from Woking by train, he would still have to rely on horse-drawn carriages for local travel. This was true even in London and applied as well to the transportation of goods and objects, so the nineteenth century actually ended at the railroad station, and an earlier age began just outside it.

  This simple fact marks just one of the significant differences between life in the late 1800s and what it would become over the course of the next half-century. If, like Wells’s Time Traveller, we could visit London in 1895, we would be shocked at its utter filthiness and dismayed by streets fouled with the manure of countless horses, making walking fetid and hazardous. We would quickly discover that the water supply, especially in densely populated areas, was dangerous, since modern sewage systems required extensive and expensive construction no government was prepared to finance. The poor, the vast majority of the population, lived thoroughly unhealthy and, usually, short lives. They had no sanitary facilities, drew water from public pumps, and bathed very infrequently. Consequently, lice, fleas, and other parasites were commonplace, as were the diseases they transmitted. This, coupled with air made opaque by coal smoke (the famous London fog), made urban life uncomfortable and poisonous. With the gradual development of pure water delivery systems, sewage systems, standards of hygiene, and public health inspections, the quality of life improved for everyone, but chamber pots, which we are likely to regard as ancient, quaint artifacts, remained in common use, especially in the country, until well into the twentieth century. Here is Wells, in his 1907 suite of socialist essays New Worlds for Old, commenting on the 1905 Report of the Education Committee of the London County Council:

  Taking want of personal cleanliness as the next indication of neglect at home [he’d already commented on the inadequate clothing worn by poor children], 11 per cent of the boys are reported as “very dirty and verminous.” ... Eleven per cent verminous; think what it means! Think what the homes must be like from which these poor little wretches come! Better perhaps than the country cottage where the cesspool drains into the water-supply and the henhouse vermin invades the home, but surely intolerable beside our comforts.1

  These public health problems, along with alcoholism, a problem as serious then as drug abuse is today, infuriated Wells because he thought social management and technology could eliminate them. But it would be a mistake to think Wells felt sorry for the poor because he had lived in poverty as a boy and felt he could better their lot. Actually, he felt contempt for the poor and, by 1895, has left his poverty behind forever: He earns almost 800 pounds per year from his writing, enough to put him solidly in the middle class. But he does have expenses: He is freshly divorced from his first wife, Isabel, and paying her 100 pounds per year in alimony. He is also supporting his parents—another 60 pounds. To make ends meet, to have a larger living space, and to exempt himself from a too-busy social life that distracted him from his almost superhuman writing schedule, he moves to the county of Surrey—just southwest of London County and bordered on the north by the river Thames—and resides in the town of Woking on the London and South-Western railway line. It is in Woking that he produces his bicycling novel The Wheels of Chance, as well as The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and any number of short pieces, fiction and nonfiction. Wells describes his move to Woking in his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography:

  Our withdrawal to Woking was a fairly cheerful adventure. Woking was the site of the first crematorium but few of our friends made more than five or six jokes about that. We borrowed a hundred pounds by a mortgage on Mrs. Robbins’ [his mother-in-law] house in Putney and with that hundred pounds, believe it or not, we furnished a small resolute semi-detached villa with a minute greenhouse in the Maybury Road facing the railway line, where all night long the goods trains shunted and bumped and clattered—without serious effect upon our healthy slumbers....In all directions stretched open and undeveloped heath land, so that we could walk and presently learn to ride bicycles and restore our broken contact with the open air. There I planned and wrote the War of the Worlds, the Wheels of Chance and the Invisible Man. I learnt to ride my bicycle upon sandy tracks with none but God to help me; he chastened me considerably in the process, and after a fall one day I wrote down a description of the state of my legs which became the opening chapter of the Wheels of Chance.2

  The poverty of his early years—like the protagonist of The Wheels of Chance, he was apprenticed to a draper in 1880, worked a seventy-hour week, lived in a dormitory, and ate unhealthy food—coupled with his scientific training at the Normal School of Science, where he was a scholarship student, made him acutely aware of the shortcomings of sanitary conditions in England, so that when he oversaw the construction of his first house, Spade House, in 1900, he made certain it would be as modern a structure as possible, especially with regard to plumbing.

  Knowing exactly where Wells lived in 1895 is essential for an understanding of The War of the Worlds because he minutely explored the area around Woking by bicycle and made it the setting for his romance, as he says in a letter in which he comments on the first, magazine version of the novel:

  I’m doing the dearest little serial for Pearson’s new magazine in which I completely wreck and sack Woking—killing my neighbors in painful and eccentric ways—then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.3

  Once again, as he had in The Invisible Man, Wells would create a situation in which the world right outside the door is invaded by a totally fantastic agency. This is his literary masterstroke in The War of the Worlds, making banal reality into something terrifying, a technique that contrasts vividly with his modus operandi in, for example, The Time Machine or When the Sleeper Wakes, where a character from Wells’s present is magically transported to the future. In those works, Wells’s social message is more overt, while in novels like The Invisible Man or The War of the Worlds the reader is caught up in the combination of the everyday and the b
izarre. Small wonder Orson Welles ( 1915-1985) caused panic and mass hysteria in October 1938, when he transposed The War of the Worlds to New Jersey for a Halloween radio program.

  What Wells constantly suggests is that reality in 1895 England is a paradox. For example, the nation where the industrial revolution was born lacked a uniform electrical grid. This meant that only parts of London had electricity and that outside of London people had to use gas and oil lamps for lighting. The reasons why electrification in England lagged so far behind Germany and the United States are complex but probably relate to public distrust of utility monopolies. During the nineteenth century, concessions to railroad companies, then gas companies, then water companies meant that owners of land saw huge chunks of their property ceded to private companies. Finally, they resisted, and the result, beginning in 1882 with the Electrical Lighting Act, was a series of retrograde measures that hamstrung national electrification.

  This situation, in which local interests—private property and personal animosities—thwart something that is an obvious advantage to the entire community, is the kind of dilemma Wells understood to be absurd. If electrical power is good for all, then, Wells would argue, it should be brought in as soon as possible. The welfare of all must take precedence over the welfare of the few, though soon enough Wells began to see that some members of society were more important than others, that a technocratic elite not only had the right but the obligation to run society.

  His most important statements about the future appear in Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902). This is Wells writing what we might call “futurology,” probable changes in human life and society that flow logically, at least from the author’s point of view, from the current situation. Wells’s hopes for the future—these articles are, after all, speculations and not prophecies—reside on a single principle: that future society, which Wells calls the “New Republic,” will be governed by a confederation of technocrats scientifically trained to deal with a world where economic globalization is a fact of life.

  These New Republicans will not be benevolent but pragmatic. For example, they will regard war not as a conflict between armies but one between peoples. This is the “total war” Adolph Hitler ( 1889-1945) put into practice, an idea that includes not only military campaigns but the actual right to exist of “inferior people,” whole races Wells views as excluded from the technological domination of nature. As he himself says:

  And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world-state with a common language and a common rule. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult.... The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.4

  This astonishing passage, in which the phrase “have to go” sanctions genocide, reminds us that the difference between one kind of totalitarianism and another is more a matter of nuance than ideology. That is, Wells deals in words, not acts, but the twentieth century would see Hitler and Josef Stalin (1879-1953) put ideas into practice that resemble Wells’s notions with harrowing results. Wells’s racism, unlike that of Hitler, does not derive from any discernable biological theory of racial superiority—though his sweeping statement about “swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people” strongly suggests it—but from the idea that only an educated elite has the right to govern, while the obligation of the masses is to serve. Those who do not qualify for a place in the New Republic will have to be exterminated, not out of cruelty but out of a twisted kind of altruism: If they are truly unfit, they only waste resources and pollute the society of the new elite.

  This new society will assert itself through violence. Wells notes that the New Republic will flourish in times of peace, but that it develops “only very painfully and slowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses.” Its development will accelerate because war is inevitable and, along with it, “the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash such a body [society as it is], under the hammer of war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure the same result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends.”5 While this advocacy of violence is shocking, it is nevertheless the hallmark of the twentieth century’s most prominent forms of totalitarianism, fascism and Marxism-Leninism. While each puts into practice at least some of Wells’s ideas, they are different because they correspond to specific national and cultural contexts and histories. Wells’s ultimate hope is to move mankind (at least what he would call the best of it) beyond the nation state into a single corporate nation with one language and a single purpose.

  Wells is the product of a peculiar moment in Western history. Between 1814, the final defeat of Napoleon, and 1914, the outbreak of World War I, there is a century of relative peace for Europeans. There are international conflicts (the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and the Boer War of 1899-1902) as well as myriad internal and civil clashes (uprisings all over Europe in 1848 and the American Civil War of 1861-1865, for example), but none of these compares to World War I in terms of casualties, destruction, and collective demoralization. It may well be, giving him the benefit of the doubt, that Wells had no clear grasp of the full meaning of what he was advocating in the name of social rationalization, but the fact is that his proposals—genocide, the subordination of individual rights to the needs of the state, and the concept of total war—are all too familiar to those born during the twentieth century. It is certainly the case that Wells’s hideously radical thought makes most of us cringe, but we must also remember that everything he wrote was echoed, repeated, and, unfortunately, practiced by others.

  Anticipations was not one of Wells’s popular books, but its retrospective importance with regard to The War of the Worlds is immense. Wells could not create his New Republic anywhere in the real world, so he caused it to take place in the realm of the imagination. The War of the Worlds is nothing more or less than the attempt of an alien New Republic to take control of the world as it is. Whenever novelists or filmmakers imagine alien races, they conceive them as racially homogeneous and all speaking the same language. Wells’s Martians all look exactly alike, speak the same language, and act like the moving parts of a vast machine.

  The Martians were born from an article Wells published in November 1893 in the Pall Mall Budget, “The Man of the Year Million.” This semi-satirical piece applies the concept of evolution postulated by Charles Darwin ( 1809-1882) and popularized by the one professor at the Normal School of Science Wells idolized, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). While evolution is the subject of the essay, the style derives from Thomas Carlyle ( 1795-1881), one of Wells’s favorite writers and author of Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh ( 1833-1834), and Carlyle was himself influenced by yet another of Wells’s favorites, Laurence Sterne ( 1713-1768), author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759—1767). In the case of Carlyle, the name “Teufelsdröckh” means “devil’s dung” in German, while his title, Sartor Resartus, means “The Tailor Re-tailored.” In turn, Wells claims to be presenting the ideas of Professor Holzkopf (Professor Wooden Head) who teaches at the University of Wessnictwo (“I don’t know where”).

  The man of the future, says Professor Holzkopf, will have a larger brain than he does now, and his bod
y will atrophy, except for his hands, which will grow stronger and more dexterous. Human evolution will bring a simplification of the body, so the ears, nose, brow ridges, and feet will disappear. Digestion, often an arduous process, will also be replaced: Humans will simply immerse themselves in nutritious fluids and absorb nourishment. To move, they will use their hands to hop over a world devoid of harmful bacteria, devoid of plants and animals, a world inhabited only by humans. The comic magazine Punch published a mocking poem on Wells’s article, and his readers understood that his facetious tone concealed genuine speculation about human evolution, a theme calculated to arouse the fury of Darwin’s many enemies.

  Wells’s “man of the year million” is remarkably similar to the Martians in The War of the Worlds:

  They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils—indeed the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body ... was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear.... In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly... the hands (pp.141-142).