Review: The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Two good introductions here in this edition: one biographical, one assessing the work. A final epilogue further assesses the work as seminal to the sci-fi genre.

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” Sublime. It is in such transcendant lines that Wells rises above the genre he spawed - so often poorly written as it is - to offer us literature. Another such passage concerns displaced refugees: "Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-a stampede gigantic and terrible-without order and without
a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind." Something in this seems to presage the society-destroying tumult of World War II.

On that, a vivid passage recalls to me reports of the entrapment and miraculous/ad hoc Dunkirk rescue from Dunkirk: "For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to
bring off the people. They lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks-English, Scotch, French,
Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts, electric boats; and beyond were ships of large burden, a multitude of fflthy colliers, trim merchantnen, cattle ships, passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport even, neat white and grey Iiners from Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast across the Blackwater my brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of boats chaffering with the people on the beach..."

I've read this work before and on this reading I found it largely purged for me the few different movie treatments, each of which I have enjoyed multiple times. Enough of impenetrable force fields! I enjoy that the weakness of Martian technology is not explored for such human qualities of interest, charity, distraction, and horror. Life goes on while Martians march to London and the author comes across the signs of resilience and regrouping crawling out of the wreckage...

Also, the image of burning train and the lack of concern/responsiveness from the populace; that's in the book and while it seems awkward/inexplicable in the Cruise move treatment, now seems a Britishism ("Keep Calm and Carry On") visitation of the original.



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