Number 154
Title: The War of The Worlds
Author: H. G. Wells
Summed
up in one line: So a Scientist, a Solider and a Reverend walk into an alien invasion...
Overall,
I: think
before I make any comments that I give War of the World’s it’s due hat-tip as
being one of the precursors of it’s genre and for the basic facts that for it’s
time it was leaps and bounds of imagination into the wild. And even now I think
if you’re not being forced to read this for a class and pick it apart, its
pretty decent reading.
The story
goes, (and as it’s 117 years old I think you can allow me spoilers) that a
bunch of Martians come to earth, catching humanity by complete surprise. They
stomp all over the home counties, slurp on tasty human plasma like we’re walking
Capri-suns and then die of the sniffles and athletes foot.
I have to
say, I do like the Martians. H.G. Wells goes to great lengths to describe them
and it’s effective- you get a really good visual image of some kind of oozing,
creepy-ass octopus beast, and he even goes so far as to try and provide some
logical sciencey reasons for how they act, and look and relate to the world
around them. Of course this is fiction, so all the science should basically be
taken with enough salt to cure a moderately sized gammon, but as we’re
generally allowed to believe that the narrator of the tale isn’t nearly as
clever as he thinks he is and basically enjoys pulling conjecture out of his
arse, then the somewhat flimsy science is quite tolerable.
Let’s talk
about him. Comparing him to the Invisible Man, who was a ball of rage and
chemicals, and the Professor in The Time Machine, who was just reprehensibly
useless, I found this character a lot easier to stomach. He at least has a
sense of purpose- he’s unsure and prone to misguided titting about, but he kind
of has some idea of his next step, even if not his end goal. The other
characters still feel rather archetypal; more like tropes than people,
especially the religious man and the soldier, and I’m not even sure they do
their tropes very effectively either. One thing though- read the Solider’s
post-apocalypse plan and play Time Machine bingo, because I’d happily put money
that those paragraphs spawned the idea of Eloi and Morlocks and the splitting
of man’s evolutionary path.
It’s an
interesting mental exercise to try and imagine the invasion happening in modern
day exactly how the Martian’s tried to do it in the novel. It would basically
boil down to them failing a lot quicker; facebook being flooded with millions of
selfies of people with the tripods stomping about in the background, and
America would start a special branch of NASA dedicated to sending Mars a
warhead with a massive Fuck You written on it. God knows what PETA would do,
but it’d no doubt be pretty funny to watch.
As to the
ending, well, at first I thought it was a bit lame. The protagonist waddles
around in swamps waxing philosophical and waning woe is me, and then the
Martian’s just die of the flu and no one really has to do anything about
anything after all. As with Dracula, and being the spoilt modern
Blockbuster-raised child that I am, I felt a bit cheated of my hoped-for blaze
of glory. He could at least have died interestingly, on the brink of realizing that
there was hope for humanity, but you’re never quite sure. Thinking about it now
though, I guess I don’t mind as such. It’s no doubt more realistic and at the
bones of it, a damn British approach to most issues. Have a cup of tea dear and
wait- this silly invasion business’ll probably all just blow over and won’t we
have a laugh then.
And
I will: Stop slacking and write up my other reviews.
