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 ( 1646-1716), 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.
27 (p. 98) how much they understood of us: The narrator wonders if the Martians imagine humans as anything but mindless insects. Wells uses this opportunity to introduce the issue of the Martians’ food. Since blood is their food, it seems unlikely they will exterminate humanity.
28 (p. 98) I so far forgot my personal safety: The narrator is now possessed by curiosity, so much so that he risks his life to witness the firing of the black-smoke projectiles by the Martians. This same curiosity will cause him to follow the invasion to its final moments. But the fact that he is a witness does not make him a leader. He may have insights into what must be done, but the future task of galvanizing humanity into a force like that of the Martians will belong to others. In this sense, he is like Wells, who visualizes the need to unify humanity politically and economically but is not himself the leader who can bring this about.
29 (p. 115) a bearded, eagle-faced man... lay limp and dead: Wells’s anti-Semitism, typical of the times, makes him include this grotesque picture of a man so greedy he dies trying to save his money rather than leaving it behind to save his life.
30 (p. 121) Committee of Public Supply, seized the pony as provisions: The pony is to be eaten. Private property ceases to exist in the face of universal crisis, and the needs of the many—food, in this case—supersede those of the individual.
Book Two
1 (p. 131) In the first book I have wandered: The narrator picks up the thread of his own story, taking us back to his situation in book one, chapter 15.
2 (p. 141) imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon: A standard device in fantastic fiction is the notion “you had to be there”—that is, language is inadequate to describe this object. Of course, the object in question never existed, but the rhetorical device enhances the realism of