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