"The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells

“The War of the Worlds” is a book that I was slightly hesitant to rate because I am so far outside of its initial target audience. To say that the book was written for a different time is an understatement; the book was published in a world before telephones, before cars, before planes, before the atom bomb — in a world where England was the central world power. It is incredibly important to preface my thoughts on the book with: I am a hundred and twenty-five years late.

I’m reminded in many ways of “Lord of the Flies,” not in terms of content, story, or structure, but rather in my experience reading it. Much like the aforementioned book, “The War of the Worlds” was often more interesting to think about than to actually sit and read. I’d put an estimate at about half of the book being enjoyable — that being the first quarter and last quarter — while the other fifty percent was an absolute slog. The introduction did a wonderful job of getting me invested, but because I am so divorced from the context of what all the locations are I found my eyes glazing over as soon as the protagonist fled his hometown. Specifically the second time he fled after attempting to return the horse and cart which he borrowed. After that point my investment slowly drained away as my eyes glazed over every time the narrator started explaining how locations were being affected. I do wonder if I should have read this book with a map handy to consult. As soon as the story zoomed back in onto the protagonist in the second part and was more focused on what he was seeing and experiencing, my investment rose and I found myself entirely engaged again.

The descriptions of the Martians and their technology were delightfully inhuman in a way that I’m not particularly used to seeing. Wells imagines space and alien life as hostile, perhaps entirely impossible to understand, which is an interpretation that seems as if it has drifted away into the realm of scifi-horror. Perhaps it’s on me and the media I am consuming, but the primarily humanoid aliens of Star Wars and Star Trek are what comes to mind when aliens are discussed. Not an incomprehensible or hostile force, but something that’s not that far away from mankind. (Those designs fit much better tonally for what Star Wars and Star Trek are exploring, but that’s a tangent for another time.) While I am not qualified or knowledgeable enough about the history of science-fiction to make inferences, it’s very easy to imagine how this book was heavily influential on the genre. The limited transfer of information and slower methods of transportation are integral hindrances to the story and setting, and due to those restrictions the aliens are honestly also quite weak by a modern standard. The Martians are a force just beyond Victorian England’s ability. World War I was still nearly two decades away; chemical warfare at the scale the Martians levied had yet to be realized in human conflict. Despite the inherent danger of the Martians’ Heat-Rays and Black Smoke, it’s easy to imagine modern weaponry shredding through the Martians, which is probably why adaptations of the novel have deviated from the source material so dramatically.

Wells depicts the horrors of an incomprehensible war with a factual — if disgusted— calm. The narrator feels detached from his recountings at times, even as he describes his own terror. Tonally this is very much a recounting of an event, both in terms of the content of the narration and the framing of the story, where the narrator is giving a somewhat academic recount of his experiences. The book is not written as horror, but it is easy to extrapolate the events as such, even if not presented so by the prose. I think this is why the second ‘book’ worked so well for me: it expanded closer to those fields and presented an active and continuous struggle for survival as the protagonist was trapped and forced to observe aliens he had no way to understand. By the end of the book — an indeterminate amount of time after the Martian invasion — humanity is still no closer to understanding the machinations of the Martians’ fantastical weaponry.

The final page of the book has the narrator recounting, to my understanding, nearly verbatim the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which I think is an incredible insight into how such events could affect a man given that PTSD was not recognized as a mental illness until nearly a century later. I don’t mean to imply that the idea of trauma is some new-age discovery, but rather to appreciate that Wells succinctly nails the deep-running impact witnessing horrific events can have on an individual without condemning said individual. While there’s a level of cynicism that runs throughout the book, I believe Wells’ final conclusion is one of apprehensive hope. Though damaged and hurt, humanity weathered the month long war of death and destruction, and England has the opportunity to rebuild with help willingly provided by its neighbors. The potential threat of another invasion always looms, but now that humanity knows what to look for, it will not be caught off guard.