the novel.
3 (p. 142) fresh, living blood of other creatures: Like vampires, the Martians live on blood. The same year Wells’s novel was serialized (1897), Bram Stoker (1847-1912) published Dracula, in which London is attacked by “foreign” creatures. But where Stoker continues the tradition of the Gothic novel, with its emphasis on horror for the sake of horror—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) had already brought vampires (female) into Victorian England in Carmilla (1872)—Wells uses vampirism as a means to speculate about human evolution. The Martians have been streamlined by nature and by their own self-modification, and are, in short, Wells’s ideal for humanity. The reference on p. 144 to an article published in 1893 in the Pall Mall Budget is self-referential: In November 1893 Wells published “The Man of the Year Million,” a semi-satirical piece that postulates a future humanity remarkably similar to the Martians. The comic magazine Punch subsequently published a poem mocking Wells’s article.
4 (p. 145) the vegetable kingdom in Mars ... is of a vivid blood-red tint: Here Wells plays with our accepted notions of color coding. Green, associated on Earth with hope and with nature, is the color of the smoke produced by the Martian machinery; red, the color we link with passion and blood, is the color of Martian vegetation. Only the ominous Black Smoke is a danger signal on both planets.
5 (p. 149) as lacking in restraint as a silly woman: The adjective is important here because it saves the narrator from slipping into sexism and because it reminds us that his brother has discovered in Miss Elphinstone a new kind of woman, one unafraid to take action.
6 (p. 156) We have sinned, we have fallen short: The curate drifts into madness, confessing his (and perhaps the entire clergy’s) abandonment of the poor. Again, he sees the Martian invasion as a divine judgment passed on humanity, and for that reason he combines self-criticism with references to the Bible’s Book of Revelation and the end of the world. But Wells, the God of the text, the author of this calamity, sees the Martian invasion as an opportunity for humanity to realize its collective identity and to unite in a world political, economic, and social organization. In short, he wants humans to be Martians, even if he never explains what the nature of Martian society might be.
7 (p. 173) It isn’t quite according to what a man wants for his species, but it’s about what the facts point to: The artilleryman enunciates one of Wells’s favorite principles of social evolution—namely, that utopias are mere words, while reality is composed of objective facts. Either humans will adapt to the new reality, or they will become cattle for the Martians. A manic survivalist, the artilleryman goes on to elaborate a plan (pp. 176-177) for an underground society whose entire purpose is, as he says, to “save the race.” However, like the narrator, the artilleryman is not a leader. He is flawed and will eventually succumb to his own vices, especially alcohol. Even so, Wells intends for the artilleryman’s ideas to raise the consciousness of the reader.
8 (p. 176) I, a professed and recognized writer... and he, a common soldier: Wells puts his pragmatic social Darwinism into practice here. The artilleryman formulates a program as a reaction to reality; the philosophic narrator thinks in terms of tradition.
9 (p. 201) this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men: Wells returns to his social message, especially “the conception of the commonweal of mankind.” A sacrifice was made in terms of life and property, but a greater good may come of it: a world government.
10 (p. 201) slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable: Wells expresses here the entropy theory—that the sun, like any dynamic system, must inevitably lose energy and die. This idea is also present in The Time Machine (1895); see note 4 for book one.
Inspired by The War of the Worlds
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, ... those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.”
—Orson Welles, from his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells’s pioneering science fiction novel The War of the Worlds has inspired films, a television series, a rock opera, comic books, sequels, parodies, and scores of imitations. By far the best-known adaptation is the one Orson Welles produced for radio in 1938.
Before he turned