by H. G. Wells
In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or artillery before it was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge, or they might be butchered by means of guns so soon as the screw opened. It seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the failure of their first surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light.
Lessinghs has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view of an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see the drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their remarkable resemblance in character.
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;9 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. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.
The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, 10 as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.
Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.
I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day....
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
Endnotes - The War of the Worlds
Epigraph: But who shall dwell in these wôrlds if they be inhabited? ... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?: In his book The Anatomy of Melancholy ( 1621-1651 ), Robert Burton elaborates on the thoughts of astronomer Johannes Kepler ( 1571-1630). In “The Second Partition: The Cure of Melancholy,” section 2, Digression of Air, Burton writes: “But who shall dwell in these vast bodies, Earths, Worlds, if they be inhabited? Rational creatures? as Kepler demands, or have they souls to be saved? or do they inhabit a better part of the World than we do? Are we or they Lords of the World? And how are all things made for man? It is a difficult knot to untie: ’tis hard to determine; this only he proves, that we are in the best place, best world, nearest the heart of the Sun.”
Book One
1 (p. 9) intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own: Wells signals the reader here that Earth will not be conquered by the invading Martians, who, despite their intellectual, scientific, and technological superiority, are not immortal.
2 (p. 9) No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space: Wells’s narrator concludes that the outer planets cooled sooner than Earth, that life started there earlier, and that, therefore, the Martians are older than humans and inhabit an older planet.
3 (p. 9) The planet Mars: The fourth planet from the sun and red in appearance, Mars is named for the Greco-Roman god of war. Its mean distance, or mid-point between furthest and closest distance from the sun, is approximately 141 million miles. The Martian year, the time it takes Mars to rotate around the sun, is approximately 687 days. When Mars, Earth, and the sun are in alignment (in opposition), Mars is at its closest to the sun (the perihelion). At that time, which recurs every 15 to 17 years, Mars is about 35 million miles from Earth. When Mars is farthest from the sun, it is about 63 million miles from Earth. Mars’s diameter (4,200 miles) is about half that of Earth; its mass is 11 percent that of Earth’s. In 1877 Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli ( 1835-1910) discovered the lines on Mars’s surface, which he called canals. American astronomer Percival Lowell ( 1855-1916) propagated the notion that the canals were water-carrying aqueducts and that Mars was inhabited.
4 (p. 9) if the nebular hypothesis has any truth: The nebular hypothesis is a theory regarding the origin of the planets in the solar system. First enunciated by Immanuel Kant ( 1724-1804), it was restated in scientific terms by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), who proposed that the solar system initially was a nebula composed of a hot, rotating mass of matter that slowly cooled and shrank. As the volume grew smaller, the speed of rotation increased, eventually transforming the nebula into a flat disk. Later, when the centrifugal force pulling matter away from the center or equator was equal to the force of gravity at the center, an outer ring of gaseous matter detached itself from the disk. This took place again and again, each ring eventually forming a planet. The center became the sun. Many objections to this theory have been raised, but its importance to Wells’s story is immense : Mars is older than Earth; its inhabitants are, therefore, much further evolved mentally and socially than the inhabitants of Earth; and their planet is dying, obliging the Martians to look to our planet as a safe haven. Readers of Wells’s The Time Machine will recall that the Time Traveller goes millions of years into the future and finds a dying planet barely warmed by a fading sun. Wells and his generation believed in entropy—that any system, including the solar system, eventually loses energy and dies.
; 5 (p. 10) The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts: This passage relates to Wells’s belief that world government, universal education, and a globalized economy are necessary to overcome our past differences, transcend nationalism, and ensure universal progress.
6 (p. 10) stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas: Wells knows that three-fourths of Earth’s surface is covered by oceans; what he alludes to here is the arms race of the late nineteenth century that saw massive buildups of naval power in England, Germany, and Japan.
7 (p. 11) life is an incessant struggle for existence: English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) proposed a theory of evolution which hypothesized that survival of a species depends on its ability to adapt to changes in its environment. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), sociologist and philosopher, proposed the idea of “social Darwinism,” which became a rationalization for notions such as racial superiority and colonial conquest. “Survival of the fittest” became the motto of technologically advanced people in the late nineteenth century and was used to justify their efforts to control the lives and resources of pre-industrial peoples.
8 (p. 12) During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen: Here, and in subsequent paragraphs, Wells combines fact and fiction. An article published in Nature in 1894 did report a mysterious flash of light on Mars’s surface; however, the astronomer in the next paragraph—“Lavelle of Java”—is a fiction. The Daily Telegraph is a real newspaper, but the astronomer Ogilvy is an invention. Taking a cue from Jules Verne (1828-1905), Wells transforms the mysterious light reported in Nature into a vast metal-casting operation carried out by the Martians. Their spaceships are projectiles fired by a colossal cannon. So the Martians fabricate their gun in 1894 and fire their invasion ships at Earth in 1900, when Earth and Mars are closest to each other. The narrator notes, “The storm burst upon us six years ago now,” so he is “writing” in 1906, eight or nine years in the future for the first readers of the novel, which appeared as a serial in 1897 and as a book in 1898.
9 (p. 25) “It’s a movin’ ”: Wells imitates the way common people speak, as did novelist Charles Dickens. This use of lower-class speech enhances the realism of the scene.
10 (p. 26) I think everyone expected to see a- man emerge: Wells stresses the physical differences between the Martians and human beings in order to mark the clash of outmoded and modern ways of thinking. The Martians represent a new social order based on practical needs, not a society like that of England in 1900, which still had vestiges of medieval culture: a royal family and lords of the manor (p. 23).
11 (p. 43) sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart: The Martians invade Earth like a poison injected into a body: Their spaceships are bullets fired from a huge cannon; their presence is like a venom about to spread through a body.
12 (p. 43) the Martians were hammering and stirring, sleepless, indefatigable: Wells gives the Martians more nonhuman traits: They never sleep, and they never tire.
13 (p. 49) Then I remembered her cousins at Leatherhead: Leatherhead is a town southwest of London, less than 20 miles east of Woking. In this passage the narrator refers to these relatives as his wife’s cousins, but in chapter 10 (p. 52) he refers to them as “my cousins,” an apparent confusion on Wells’s part.
14 (p. 49) I knew the landlord had a horse and dog cart: A dog cart is a light, two-wheeled carriage (named because the driver sits at the rear of the coach, on top of the box originally intended to hold a dog). By this point in the story, the narrator begins to feel the “immediate pressure of necessity” (p. 10) that he had imagined prompted the Martian invasion. He realizes that to get his wife and their servant to safety, he will need a vehicle and pays an exorbitant fee to the greedy owner of the public house. This subtle but telling scene reflects the reality that, in emergencies, we are apt to sacrifice morality for survival.
15 (p. 52) war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community: Here Wells begins to transform his narrator from accidental witness to intentional reporter. After driving his wife and servant to Leatherhead, he returns to be “in at the death,” thinking the army will annihilate the sluggish Martians. His return gives him—and Wells—the opportunity to give a firsthand account of the Martian invasion.
16 (p. 54) like the working of a gigantic electric machine: As early as 1880, James Wimshurst (1832-1903) developed an electrostatic induction generator, and Wells probably saw it work in the London Science Museum. Electricity itself was not widely used in late-nineteenth-century England, and either gas or oil lamps provided domestic light in much of London.
17 (p. 54) And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it?: The Martian fighting machine stands in contrast to the Martians themselves. The narrator describes the Martians in minute detail on pp. 146-152. They do not need sleep and wear no clothes; they can barely hear on Earth and communicate by telepathy; and they live on human blood. But while Wells makes the Martians nonhuman, squid-like creatures, their three-legged machines are caricatures of the human body. At the same time, the idea of Martians riding around Surrey on three-legged machines recalls Wells’s interest in bicycling—where a man rides on top of a machine he propels (in 1896 Wells published a seriocomic novel, The Wheels of Chance, about the bicycling craze). Wells wants to make the Martians radically different from humans but at the same time to show them as a possible evolutionary future for mankind.
18 (p. 57) to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead: Wells adds yet another nuance to the narrator: Here he realizes he should be with his wife but says he is too wet and tired to retrace his steps. Fear replaces the “war fever” he feels on p. 52. Curiosity will soon displace both fear and loyalty to his wife.
19 (p. 57) It was the landlord of the Spotted Dog: Wells establishes a parallel between the dead horse (p. 55) with a broken neck and the dead landlord, whose neck is also broken. The horse represents outmoded technology unable to withstand the Martian attack, while the landlord represents a humanity concerned only with its own interests and unable to see larger issues, especially the need to organize in order to survive. Both the horse and the landlord are random victims as well, so it is as if the narrator were exempted because of their deaths so he can tell his story.
20 (p. 60) Then I perceived this was a wrecked train: In Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902), Wells states: “The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a railway.” The Martians strike terror in the humans in part by demolishing what Wells considers humanity’s crowning technological achievement of the nineteenth century.
21 (p. 64) ever and again: Note Wells’s occasional sloppiness, the unnecessary repetition of this phrase, which he uses three paragraphs above.
22 (p. 72) but I was not too terrified for thought: Earlier the narrator was saved by chance or luck. Now he is adapting to circumstance in order to survive. When a chance shell hits one of the Martians’ fighting machines—the only defensive success in the war—it is simply another case of luck. In fact, it will be sheer luck that saves humanity—the Martians’ inability to cope with earthly bacteria.
23 (p. 73) the camera that fired the Heat-Ray: It is not clear whether Wells is comparing the projector of the heat-ray weapon to a photographic camera or is referring to the little chamber where the heat is generated. A photographic camera receives light, while the Martian weapon projects heat.
24 (p. 77) earthquake that destroyed Lisbon a century ago: The Lisbon earthquake took place in 1775, so it was more than a century earlier than 1906, when the narrator is writing. The point, however, is not chronological precision but the parallel between the Martian invasion and the eighteenth-century cataclysm, which contradicted the naive optimism of those who believed, like philosopher G. W. Leibniz ( 1646-17
16), that mankind lives in “the best of all possible worlds”—that is, since God could choose among myriad possibilities, He must have chosen the best. Wells believes that reality can never be a utopia.
25 (p. 80) What does it mean? ... What do these things mean?: The delirious curate is often taken as a symbol of Wells’s anticlerical attitude. In a situation where he should be the very man to answer his own questions, the curate is impotent. With the dead horse and the lord of the manor, the curate is a vestige of a past culture that can no longer cope with the problems of the present. When the curate asks, “What are these Martians?” the narrator replies, “What are we?” The question of a divine plan or a teleological principle in history manifests itself here. Wells seems to suggest that a great cataclysm—the invasion from Mars—may be a stimulus that will bring about a new social, political, and scientific order. The curate’s physical resemblance to the subhuman Eloi, which the protagonist of The Time Machine finds in the future, is no coincidence. The curate embraces both despair (he quotes the Bible’s Book of Revelation, on p. 81, as if to confirm that God’s judgment has finally condemned humanity) and the past—the idea that mankind has no future except in its most ancient traditions. The narrator’s response is one of hope, that humans may yet save themselves.
26 (p. 82) He is not an insurance agent: This is Wells’s second reference to insurance (the first is in chapter 9, p. 45) and the irony of a plan for preservation of valuables in case of accident in a situation in which survival is the only thing of real value. The narrator’s idea that God plays no favorites is not theologically sound—mortals must accept that God’s ways are not their ways—but socially important: The disaster is universal, making all people realize their common humanity and their need to act together.