The War of the Worlds

H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and it remains one of the most precisely constructed arguments in science fiction. The argument is anti-imperialist, and it was aimed directly at his British readers: Wells took the imperial experience — superior technology arriving, destroying everything in its path, treating the local population as pests to be exterminated — and delivered it to the English as the experience of being colonized.

The first chapter makes this explicit. Wells compares the Martians' attitude toward humanity to "transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water," and then to the attitude of European settlers toward the Tasmanians, "who were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants." He is telling his readers, before the invasion begins, that what they are about to experience is what others have experienced at British hands.

This is not the novel the films made it. Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast, the Spielberg film, the Tom Cruise version — all have stripped the novel's careful anti-imperial argument from the invasion machinery. The source text is angrier and more specific about what it is doing.

The novel is also formally interesting: told by an unnamed narrator who survives by hiding, moving through a landscape of industrial and suburban England being systematically destroyed. The familiar English geography — Woking, the Thames Valley, Hampstead Heath — rendered alien is half the effect.

The narrator — an anonymous suburban intellectual, a writer, who witnesses the initial Martian landing near Woking and spends the novel trying to survive and understand. He is not heroic; he hides, he eats what he can find, he has a breakdown. His ordinariness is the point — Wells is not writing a hero's story.

The narrator's brother — who provides the novel's second significant perspective from London as the city empties. His account of the mass evacuation of London is one of the great crowd scenes in Victorian fiction.

The artilleryman — a soldier the narrator encounters twice; in the second meeting, he has developed an elaborate fantasy about rebuilding humanity underground. His grandiose planning without action is Wells's portrait of a certain kind of male fantasy.

The curate — a clergyman who attaches himself to the narrator and whose response to the invasion is religious hysteria leading to fatal collapse. Wells, an atheist and socialist, is not sympathetic.

No. 1 · The first appearance of the Heat-Ray. The Martians emerge from their cylinder and deploy the heat-ray on the crowd gathered to watch — without warning, without communication, without any effort to understand whether the humans are intelligent. The scene is terrifying and its logic is perfectly reversed imperial logic: the superior technology, the assumption that the natives don't count.

No. 2 · The evacuation of London. Told through the narrator's brother, the exodus of London's population — millions of people moving north on roads so crowded they become impassable — is rendered with the scale of a historical event. Wells is imagining what colonial displacement looks like when the displaced are English, and the detail he brings to the scene suggests he thought hard about what that experience means.

No. 3 · The artilleryman's plan. The narrator meets a soldier who has survived by hiding and who has developed an elaborate scheme: select the best humans, go underground, rebuild civilization away from Martian eyes, eventually fight back. The plan is detailed, convincing on first hearing, and entirely unfeasible — the artilleryman has built a twenty-foot tunnel in weeks and spends his days playing cards. Wells is examining the gap between planning and action, between fantasy and execution.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone who has seen an adaptation and wants the source: the novel is smarter and angrier than any film version.
• Readers interested in the imperial anxiety in late-Victorian culture — The War of the Worlds is the most direct fictional treatment.
• Anyone who wants Wells as an argument-maker rather than an entertainer: the novel is constructed around a single reversal and it is executed with precision.

Skip it if you are…

• Looking for complex characterization: the narrator is a perspective rather than a personality, and most other characters exist to make a point.
• Wanting resolution: the Martians die of bacteria, not human action. Wells's ending is deliberately deflating of heroic expectation.

• Read the first chapter carefully. Wells states his argument before the invasion begins. The Tasmanian reference is not incidental.
• The ending is the argument. The Martians die of bacteria — they could not have anticipated resistance at the microbial level. Wells is saying that imperial conquest always encounters what it cannot anticipate, and that this is cold comfort.
• Compare the two narrators. The main narrator hides and survives through passivity. His brother flees and survives through action. Neither is clearly the right approach; Wells doesn't reward the reader with a correct response.

• H.G. Wells — The Time Machine (1895). The three-years-earlier companion: the same speculative intelligence applied to class rather than empire. Reading both shows Wells's range and his consistent political purpose.
• Joseph Conrad — Heart of Darkness (1899). Published the following year, the direct engagement with imperialism from the imperial side: what empire does to its perpetrators as well as its victims.
• H.G. Wells — The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The middle novel in Wells's 1890s trilogy: a different question about what distinguishes humans from animals, and what science does when it tries to answer that question by force.

1. Wells compares the Martians' attitude toward humanity to the British attitude toward the Tasmanians in his first chapter. How explicitly does the rest of the novel sustain this analogy?
2. The Martians die of bacteria — not human resistance. What does this ending say about the relationship between human agency and natural forces?
3. The artilleryman has an elaborate plan for rebuilding civilization underground. What does Wells think of this plan, and how do you know?
4. The narrator is not heroic — he hides, collapses, and survives largely by accident. Why would Wells write the invasion from the perspective of someone ordinary?
5. The novel was published in 1898, the height of British imperial expansion. How would contemporary British readers have experienced the argument Wells was making?
6. The novel's opening paragraph observes that no one expected anything from Mars. What is Wells saying about the comfort of assumption, and the price of failing to imagine the perspective of the other?