“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 infusoria under the microscope do the same.”
—H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Book 1, chapter 1
For anyone who’s written fiction, H. G. Wells’ classic 1897 novel The War of the Worlds is a great enigma and an even greater challenge. I can’t say that I understand its secret, even after having read it at least half a dozen times.
Here’s the mystery: that almost from the beginning, we know how the story is going to turn out. The Martian invaders will be somehow defeated. Not only will humanity survive, but civilization will go on much as it did before the invasion, though at a reduced level of affluence. Wells signals this over and over. “In those days even philosophical writers had many little luxuries,” his narrator says in the seventh chapter, conveying that in the post-Martian days there will still be “philosophical writers” and people to read them, even if those writers can no longer afford silver cutlery or wine with their dinners. There are many other hints of this sort.
And yet, in spite of our knowing all this in advance, The War of the Worlds remains a page-turner. How did Wells pull this off?
What exactly gives the book its suspense?
Is it that that we know the Martians will be defeated, but we don’t know how this can possibly happen, and the how is more vital to us readers than the mere fact of humanity’s triumph?
About this how, Wells gives only the slightest advance hint (Book 2, chapter 2): “The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life.”
One might have thought it trivial–but of course it isn’t. For who doesn’t know how the novel ends?
“There are no bacteria on Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”
And perhaps there’s the faintest hint of this denouement on the very first page of Wells’ novel, the passage I quoted at the beginning of this post, where humans are compared to “the infusoria under the microscope” (and, two sentences earlier, “the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water”). Tiny and transient they are, yet nevertheless the destroyers of those who would destroy us.
As we learned from the influenza of 1918-19, as we’re once more learning in this age of COVID, they can be our destroyers as well.
But I’m writing not so much to unpack the secret behind The War of the Worlds‘ enduring power, as to express my awe and astonishment at that power. A former literary agent of mine, chatting with me about why C. S. Lewis’s attempts at science fiction left me cold, suggested it might be because they were written so long ago. But when Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, with his other masterpieces The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Queen Victoria still sat on her throne. Yet each time I reread The War of the Worlds, I’m in thrall to the horrific power of Wells’ narrative. (And The Island of Dr. Moreau inspires in me such creepy dread that I can’t bring myself any longer to open it and look inside.)
Of those three books, it’s The War of the Worlds that has become permanently fixed in our cultural awareness.
THE STORY SO REAL IT SENT 20th CENTURY AMERICANS SCREAMING INTO THE STREETS, the back cover of my paperback edition (Popular Library, 1962) calls it, and illustrates it with Martian machines that look, not really as Wells described them, but like flying saucers standing on long, spidery legs and waving their tentacles. The reference is of course to the radio version of The War of the Worlds, broadcast by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on October 30, 1938.
You probably know the story. The radio play was a free adaptation of Wells’ novel, shifted from England to New Jersey and given a particularly ingenious format. At the start, after a brief narrative introduction, we hear an orchestra playing lively dance tunes, and we know we’re in for a Sunday evening program of soothing and not very demanding music. But the music is interrupted by a series of news bulletins. Banal at first–explosions have been seen on the surface of Mars; a Princeton astronomy professor is brought on to discuss what might have caused them–but soon frantic and terrifying.
A cylinder has fallen near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Octopus-like creatures, large as bears, emerge from the cylinder. With a heat-ray they set fire to all around them … and “the next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the State Militia at Trenton, New Jersey:
“‘I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the counties of Mercer and Middlesex as far west as Princeton, and east to Jamesburg, under martial law …'”
But it is hopeless. Nothing can stop the invaders from Mars, as we soon discover them to be. And given the incredible realism of the “news bulletins,” their skillful use of familiar place names, it’s no wonder that something like a million people took them as authentic reports of a Martian invasion and went into a panic.
Of course, the panic was soon over. You couldn’t wake up on the morning of October 31 without realizing the world wasn’t quite about to end. The alien horrors of the H. G. Wells / Orson Welles fantasy were eclipsed, before many years had passed, by the more mundane horrors enacted by humans on other humans during World War II, not to mention those foreshadowed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’re left to wonder if it’s more than coincidence that, in 1897 and again in 1938, an imaginary “war of the worlds” presaged an actual world war (and that a “Well(e)s” was central to both).
Yet the “invasion” that triggered the panic wasn’t forgotten.
When the flying saucers first appeared in American skies in 1947, newspapers sometimes connected them, facetiously, with the Martians in New Jersey. (I’m afraid I didn’t note down the references, and can’t cite them here.) OK, that was less than 10 years after the Mercury Theatre broadcast … but sometime in the 2000s, the “Zits” comic strip had 15-year-old Jeremy’s father try to get a rise out of him by saying something like “I hear the Martians landed in New Jersey this morning.” The Martians / New Jersey collocation seems to have become fixed in our awareness.
And when Twitter went wild last Monday (September 14) over videos of a “New Jersey UFO” that turned out to be a Goodyear blimp, might some echoes of Mercury Theatre still have been reverberating, after nearly 82 years?
I first became aware of The War of the Worlds on the evening of September 9, 1957. That was when CBS broadcast a magnificent drama, “The Night America Trembled,” recreating the Martian-invasion panic of 1938. (You can watch it now on YouTube.) It used snatches from the original radio play and made clear to me, in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else, how people of reasonable intelligence can have been taken in by the Orson Welles performance.
They tuned in to the dance music at the beginning and used that as background music–for playing cards, say, or smooching in an automobile. Only slowly did they become aware of the “news broadcasts” that interrupted it. When at last these had captured their attention, they had no context for them. How could they not have taken for granted that they were genuine?
My parents and I watched the CBS show together. I was 9 years old, just starting fifth grade. The drama of the 1938 panic, which is what now comes across for me most strongly when I see it, made far less impression on me than the horrific tale at its center, presented only in tantalizing fragments. I knew that it wasn’t real, that Martians if they existed had never invaded the state where I’d been born (in Trenton, at the Mercer County Hospital), and that there was no reason to think they ever would. But did I really know that?
It must have been a few nights later–or weeks, or months–that my parents and I sat by our front windows, all the lights in the house turned off, and watched the night sky to the north, where extraordinary smears of luminous green and red were on display. (The Martian cylinders, Wells’ readers will recall, had torn through the sky in streaks of green.) This was the aurora borealis, as my parents surely knew–they claimed to have seen similar displays when they were students at Cornell, although I spent four years at Cornell and never saw anything like this–but I was convinced it was or at least could be a Martian invasion. I was terrified. I could have told them my fear; they could have reassured me. But I didn’t, and they didn’t, and I doubt I would have believed them anyway.
The next day the Philadelphia Bulletin reported on the aurora, so I knew that was what the strange lights must have been. I was bitterly sorry that I had missed the fun of watching it by being so scared of Martians, and hoped it would come back so I could watch it again.
It never did, though. And I’m now 72, and it never has.
I leave you with one parting thought, taken from the paragraph (“There are no bacteria on Mars … “) in which Wells explains how it was that the Martians, on the verge of becoming Earth’s new lords, were suddenly all dead:
“For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. … It was inevitable.”
In this summer-turned-autumn of terror and disaster–of plague, of fire, of devastation come from the sea–how much is there that we might foresee but don’t, dare not foresee lest we be mocked as Pollyannas? The disasters are real; there may be worse in store. But so are hope and possibility.
Let our terror not blind us to seeing them.
by David Halperin
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