The War of the Worlds: A Tale of Human Nature

This was also my first time reading The War of the Worlds and I was surprised by how Wells really delved into the human's emotional responses to the Martian attack. There were some characters who degenerated into insanity, the curator, and others who went to the extreme of social Darwinism. What interested me is that the government entirely dissolved when people no longer had the expectation of survival, affirming that government serves a purpose of securing the masses. Without such security, the “organism of government” (90) would swiftly dissolve.

I found Wells’ journalistic first person style an interesting choice. It was no wonder the 1938 broadcasting was so convincing. The story is told realistically, with no unnecessary embellishments and through the eyes of a narrator who is not omniscient and is not a physicist who can comprehensively describe the scientific background for the attacks.

In one aspect, the story is outdated. In terms of today’s communications, news of a Martian attack on earth occurring on Sunday would spread through the world almost instantaneously – there would be no waiting for Monday’s papers. However, I do still think that people would go through the same general steps of acceptance – disbelief and denial, guilt, anger, depression, acceptance and hope. Note these are also the stages of grief. The novel goes through each of these – the disbelieving masses who consider the news exciting, the guilt in the eyes of God as seen through the curator, the anger exhibited in the battles, the narrator’s absolute surrender, and the artilleryman’s acceptance of a new way of life.

A couple of observations about our interaction with the “other:” I found it interesting that in the beginning the narrator constantly makes use of personification or terrestrial-ification in his description of the extraterrestrials and their machines; people expect the Martians to look like humans, and their machines are like “metallic spiders.” We tend to construct the unknown by what we know- in our own image. Perhaps this is why the British and other colonial powers attempted to “remake” or westernize China and its other domains into how a civilization “ought to look.” That desire to reconstruct something foreign into what we know, coupled with ideas of superiority and the want for material wealth, certainly lead to the age of imperialism.

Lastly, I wonder if Wells is critiquing our present reliance on technology when he predicts we are on the same evolutionary course as the Martians. We are becoming all “brain” and no “body” – meaning we are sacrificing our emotions for greater intellectual power. Perhaps this is one of his greatest warnings – that we cannot sacrifice all in the interests of expediency. I also did not expect this book to make me rethink becoming a vegetarian .