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

  The Martians derive nourishment from human blood, which they inject directly into their bodies. They require no sleep, never tire, work twenty-four hours a day, wear no clothes, reproduce by budding instead of sexual intercourse, and communicate telepathically. In short, they are the hyper-efficient descendants of the founders of Wells’s New Republic.

  Wells imposes on them an absolutely desperate situation: Mars is rapidly cooling and will no longer be able to support life. The Martians must either die or migrate to another planet. They attempt to colonize Earth. Wells solves their transportation problem by resorting to a device conceived by Jules Verne (1828-1905), author of From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the supercannon that fires a projectile-spaceship. Somehow, the Martians survive the recoil of launching and then emerge unscathed from the crash of the projectile into Earth. Another amazing feat is the precision of the Martians’ aim: Even though three-quarters of Earth’s surface is water, they manage to place all their projectiles in and around Woking. Just these gross improbabilities should suffice to show that Wells, unlike Verne, is writing not science fiction but social allegory.

  In allegory, the literal level-what actually happens in the text’s action—is the first tier in the work’s meaning. Dante ( 1265-1321 ) in The Divine Comedy is aided by Virgil, who leads him to Beatrice. Dante is real (the literal level), but he is also a kind of Everyman, helped by reason (Virgil) and then grace (Beatrice) to attain salvation. Wells doesn’t need such a complicated apparatus. In fact, the literal level dominates most of the novel, and the Martians are the only element that demands multiple readings.

  Within Wells’s personal interpretation of evolution, the Martians are what humans will be thousands of centuries into the future. They are also an implacable outside force that galvanizes the anarchic body of mankind into a collective response. They are, then, any crisis that threatens humanity and that will stimulate the formation of a totally organized collective state designed to protect the future of all people. Their spaceships, their weapons (they use a heat-ray, poison gas, and fighting machines), are nothing more than imaginative projections, Wells’s way of providing his intervening agency with the means to destroy the old order of society.

  The Martians also reflect Wells himself. Just as the bicycle liberated Wells from the limitations of a weak body, the machines used by the Martians, who are weighed down because the pull of gravity is stronger on Earth than it is on Mars, enable them to move swiftly and attack without warning. The machine is an extension of a body, a kind of prosthetic device that supplies an ability the body lacks. The Martian sitting on top of a huge, three-legged fighting machine striding across Surrey toward London resembles nothing so much as Wells piloting his bicycle around the countryside. And the Martians, like Wells, tend to work alone. That is, while they are involved in a collective activity—the invasion and conquest of England, which is, by extension, the world—they work alone in their fighting machines or their aluminum manufacturing devices. Except for their time in the space capsule, they are rarely together.

  Wells’s first problem was to decide how to tell such a tale. He could use an external, omniscient narrator, but that would cut down on the immediacy of the action and make it seem much more like history. A single first-person narrator would be possible, but that person would have to travel long distances at almost superhuman speed in order to see everything involved in the Martian invasion. Wells opts for a device Robert Louis Stevenson ( 1850-1894) uses in Treasure Island (1883), having a first-person narrative become two first-person narratives by introducing a second character who tells us about what happened elsewhere. This is, admittedly, an awkward device because the two characters—brothers in The War of the Worlds—are not in communication with each other. Their separate stories become a single story because the primary narrator takes control of his brother’s tale, treating him in the same way an omniscient narrator would treat a character.

  The primary narrator, then, is both witness and author, a modification of the narrator of The Time Machine, who transcribes the story of the Time Traveller. The personality of this narrator is a vexing matter, and it is here Wells departs from traditional novelistic practice. Wells clearly had many options in this situation: He could make his nondescript, suburban science writer into a hero by having him either subdue the Martians or lay the foundations for an - organized defense. That solution does not suit Wells’s hidden intention, which is to warn those people capable of understanding that their world is rotten and will fall at the first blow from an outside force.

  Wells does what in both human and novelistic terms makes the most sense: He makes his narrator a man of science, but a conventional thinker and not a man in the line of the Time Traveller. He is not a leader, not a warrior, but a man imbued with curiosity. He wants to understand the Martians, wants to observe their machines, and wants to survive to tell the tale. His psychological depth is slight: He loves his wife, detests the mad clergyman who almost manages to deliver him to the Martians, feels guilt about being responsible for the man’s death, and has a nervous breakdown after learning that the Martians all die because of Earth’s bacteria. The second central figure, the narrator’s brother, is no more developed than the narrator. He is a “medical student, working for an imminent examination” (p. 83), but that is all we know of him. When, in the final chapter of book one, Wells feels he no longer needs the brother, he simply has him board a ship, witness a navy vessel ram two Martian fighting machines, and sail to Europe. We then return to the adventures of our primary narrator.

  This sacrifice of character depth to action explains the success of The War of the Worlds. If Wells had transformed his narrator into a preachy precursor of his New Republicans, the reader would probably begin to cheer for the Martians. Instead, he uses both brothers as innocent points of view, reporters telling us what they saw. That they have emotions is merely incidental to their role as informants.

  Wells relegates his ideas to the minor characters, carefully linking them to human imperfections so that the novel does not degenerate into sermon or essay. Probably the most interesting example of this is the artilleryman. In book one, chapter 11, the narrator, hiding inside his Woking house, sees a man trying to escape the Martians. He invites the man in and learns he is a soldier, “a driver in the artillery” (p. 62) whose unit has been wiped out by the Martians. The two separate in chapter 12, and we think we’ve seen the last of the artilleryman—until suddenly in book two, chapter 7, he reappears, and now it is he who extends hospitality to the narrator.

  The artilleryman tells the narrator the Martians have developed a flying machine, information that sends the narrator into a depression. The artilleryman scoffs at his sadness and tells him he intends to survive. He has a plan for moving a community of survivors underground, into the drains below London. But who will be in that community? First, “able-bodied, clean-minded men” (p. 177), then:

  Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want also—mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blasted rolling eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race (p. 177).

  This new underground race will be trained in science—“not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books” (p. 177)—in order to be able to combat the Martians and, ultimately, to assimilate their knowledge. The narrator is at first astounded at the rationality of the artilleryman’s program, but soon he notices flaws, not in the plan but in the artilleryman himself. He is a drunkard. Does this invalidate his ideas? Not in the slightest, but it does suggest that he is not the right person to put them into practice. With the benefit of hindsight we might suppose the right person would be Wells himself, since what the artilleryman says coincides so closely with what Wells espouses in Anticipations.

  Three other figures stand out in the novel: the curate, Miss Elphinstone, and a “
bearded, eagle-faced man.” The curate appears in book one, chapter 13, and stays with the narrator—whose adventures are interrupted by the chapters dedicated to the narrator’s brother—until book two, chapter 4. The curate represents everything wrong with the traditional order of society. He is a clergyman, automatically a target for Wells’s anticlericalism, but worse than that, he is incapable of accepting that the “rules” as he understands them no longer apply, that the Martian invasion has turned yesterday’s reality into a dream.

  Wells’s depiction of the curate is virtually a parody of the self-satisfied, complacent social conformist:

  His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring (p. 80).

  In the context of Wells’s writing the curate is a late-nineteenth-century version of the Eloi the Time Traveller finds in the distant future. They too are blond, doll-like, and self-satisfied. Their fate is to be eaten by the Morlocks. The curate is more complex. First, he tries to fit the Martian invasion into his intellectual—that is, theological—training:

  “Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—What are these Martians?” (p. 80).

  The narrator can only respond with a question of his own: “What are we?” To understand new phenomena by automatically relating them to a code handed down from the past is, Wells asserts, impossible. The Martians are not a divine judgment but an invading force that must be understood and fought.

  In the chapter that recounts his death, the curate has become a madman, alternating between fits of gluttony, in which he consumes as much food as he can, and religious hysteria, in which he blames himself for what has happened:

  “It is just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly—my God, what folly!—when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon them to repent—repent! ... Oppressors of the poor and needy ... !” (p. 156).

  Even in this madness we detect a thread of criticism that leads straight to Wells: The Church should be at the service of the poor, but it merely serves the status quo. Like all other institutions of the pre-Martian world, it will have to be replaced. When the curate’s shrieking threatens to reveal their position to the Martians, the narrator has no choice but to silence him. He knocks him out, but before he can do anything to save him, a Martian sends in a metallic tentacle that drags the curate to his doom. His blood will be food for the Martian.

  Miss Elphinstone and the “bearded, eagle-faced man” are very different but absolutely important elements in Wells’s vision. Both appear in the chapters in which the principal actor is the narrator’s medical student brother. As he makes his escape from London, the brother becomes an accidental hero. Three men are attacking two women riding in a small carriage pulled by a pony. Wells’s initial description of the scene is critical:

  One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged hand (p. 106).

  The woman screaming (Mrs. Elphinstone) is a female version of the curate, unable to react rationally to the situation, incapable of saving herself. The other woman (Miss Elphinstone, sister to Mrs. Elphinstone’s husband) not only tries to save herself but actually comes to the aid of the brother when he finds himself facing two assailants:

  He would have had little chance against them had not the slender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It seems she had had a revolver.... She fired at six yards’ distance, narrowly missing my brother (p. 107).

  Miss Elphinstone embodies the artilleryman’s idea of the “able-bodied, clean-minded” woman who will be a partner to the man of the new society. By working together, the brother and Miss Elphinstone save not only themselves—they board a ship bound for Ostend that takes them not only out of England but out of the novel as well—but also the incompetent Mrs. Elphinstone. Wells’s vision of the new woman is that of a self-reliant, independent individual, able to think and act on her own, no longer the “inferior vessel” of past ages.

  The “bearded, eagle-faced man” is a problematic image for modern readers. As the brother and the two Elphinstone women make their way toward the sea, they run into a throng of refugees:

  Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling (p. 114).

  This man is Wells’s caricature Jew, running for his life but unable to see that money is not going to be his salvation. When his bag bursts and his gold coins spill onto the highway, he risks his life trying to save his money. The brother tries to save the man, whose back is broken when he is run over by a carriage. But even as the brother tries to pull the fatally injured man out of traffic: “My brother looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar” (p. 115). His love of gold far outweighs his instinct to survive. This is Wells’s version of the anti-Semitism common in England at the time, that Jews were money-grubbing monsters who cared for nothing but gold. It is an unfortunate side of an author so liberal and clear-thinking in so many other areas, but one we must see if we are to have a clear image of the man and his writing.

  The War of the Worlds is remarkable for its economy. All of the action takes place in a two-week period, with a three-day coda when the narrator has a nervous breakdown (book two, chapter 9) after the Martians fall victim to bacterial infection. The narrator recovers, makes his way home to Woking, and there finds his wife. It would seem the circle closes, that life returns to normalcy, that the Martian threat will fade from memory, and that complacency will reign again. But this is not so. In his epilogue (book two, chapter 10), the narrator shows that human history has been irrevocably changed:

  At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind (p. 201).

  The Martian invasion may, Wells asserts, spur us into being prepared for any eventuality, stimulate our scientific research, and make us realize the dire need for world government—as happened later when the threat of nuclear holocaust hovered over the world after World War II. The death of thousands may be a small price if the result is the salvation of the human race.

  Whether we read The War of the Worlds as a sociopolitical allegory (Wells’s obvious intention) or as a tale of high adventure (action often speaks louder than ideas), we have here a novel we can enjoy at many levels at many times in our lives. In 1946 the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges ( 1899-1986) wrote on the occasion of Wells’s death about the impact Wells’s early works had on him, saying:

  They are the first books I ever read; perhaps they will be the last ... I think they are destined to become part ... of the collective memory of humanity and that they will multiply in that setting beyond the limits of the glor
y of the man who wrote them, beyond the death of the language in which they were written.6

  Alfred Mac Adam, a professor at Barnard College-Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art. Between 1984 and 2002, Mac Adam was the editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a publication of the Americas Society.

  Notes to the Introduction

  1 H. G. Wells, “The Good Will in Man,” in New Worlds for Old, New York: Macmillan, 1908, p. 13.

  2 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), vol. 2, London: Victor Gollancz, 1934, p. 543.

  3 Quoted in H. G. Wells: A Biography, by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973, p. 113.

  4 H. G. Wells, “The Faith of the New Republic,” in Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, London: Chapman and Hall, 1902, pp. 315, 317.

  5 Anticipations, p. 211.

  6 Jorge Luis Borges, “El primer Wells,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Ficcionario: Una Antologia de Sus Textos, edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981, p. 223 [my translation].

  But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? ... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?

  —KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

  BOOK ONE

  THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

  Chapter 1

  The Eve of the War

  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 and yet as mortal as his own:1 that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoriaa under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space2 as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.