Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Ten Things About The War of the Worlds...

...which you may or may not be aware of.

1. H. G. Wells introduced his version of the Martians in an earlier story called "The Crystal Egg." Whether he had intended specifically at that time for the Martians to become invaders in The War of the Worlds is not entirely known; certainly, this story did not directly foreshadow the invasion. The titular "crystal egg" was used by the Martians (along with a number of other unknown "eggs") as spying devices. Each egg was linked to an identical one on Mars, and in the right lighting, certain individuals could see Mars in the egg. (It was a rather Lovecraftian story, actually.) The same year, Wells also published "The Star," which offhandedly mentioned that Martian astronomers had witnessed the events of the story (namely, the formation of a new star and its near collision with Earth, followed by this star plunging into the Sun).

2. The Martians' tripods were probably made primarily out of an aluminum alloy, based on the fact that the Martians were busy refining it out of local clay in one of their bases. Certainly, they made heavy use of the stuff. The fact that they could effortlessly refine it out of common clay is one of the few areas where Wells' Martians still far surpass us.

3. Mars is a dead world, but it may be considerably "less dead" than one would think. Note that I take the following statement with a grain of salt, but it's a highly interesting possibility. Some self-appointed "Mars expert" believes that Mars may have harbored a living civilization as little as a few tens of thousands of years ago (give or take). Why? There is evidence that a large body of some kind may have come within Mars' Roche limit and shattered, thus bombarding the world with thousands of meteoric bodies and utterly wiping out life on its surface. (The same guy suggests that three particularly large impacts linked with this event created Olympus Mons and two other large extinct volcanoes on Mars' surface. Of course, Olympus Mons is supposed to be a really geologically ancient volcano...)

4. The War of the Worlds is part of the period genre from Victorian/Edwardian Britain called invasion literature. Britain was really worried at that time about some country slipping past the British Navy and invading the British Isles. While the British Army was an efficient force, it wasn't much taken seriously by the European powers; Chancellor Bismarck is said to have remarked that, if the British Army landed for an assault on Germany, he would "send the police to deal with them." Europe's armies were far larger and more powerful than Britain's, and both sides knew it; thus, Europe dreamed of landings, while Britain had nightmares. The most notable novel of the genre other than The War of the Worlds is probably The Battle of Dorking, whose name I am not making up. It is thought that the main reason Wells had knowledge of then-modern military tactics and technology is because of familiarity with the rest of the genre.

5. It is not a coincidence that Dracula was published only the year before. Imperial Britain was well aware of the fact that its position was rather precarious in the world, held in place only by the incomparable British Navy. The Navy was required to protect shipping from piracy by other nations, to keep order in the British dominions, and of course for self-defense. These things were the lifeblood of the British Empire. Britain's fascination at this time with vampires-Dracula and the Martians-was because it was well aware that it was essentially itself a vampire feeding off of its colonies.

6. As with the later "The Land Ironclads," Wells successfully predicted a future development in warfare; where in TLI he predicted tanks, in TWotW, he predicted the use of poison gas, which like the tank became a fixture of the Great War years later. He also predicted the use of "total war" tactics to some degree, although this may not have been as intentional.

7. Cannons would make incredibly impractical devices for launching objects into space for a huge variety of reasons, including difficulty in aiming over such distances and the amount of acceleration that would be required for such a launch being lethal to any living thing and strenuous on even the sturdiest of equipment.

8. Well, let's be frank-the ending of TWotW was great in its day. But it's horribly dated, too. That bacteria would somehow fail to exist on Mars is absolutely preposterous, Martian science wiping them out or no. It's not so preposterous that their immune systems would have difficulties with Earth microbes, but if the Martians were truly so advanced, they would have been able to protect themselves somehow. (This becomes even more ridiculous, really, in Spielberg's version, since those Martians are clearly as much above 21st century humans in terms of technology as Wells' Martians were above 19th century man.)

9. Many people describe the Martians as being "invincible" to the British forces; while they were close, they clearly fell short of this, as a well-placed artillery shell could kill one. (That was why they started using the Black Smoke, since the heat rays would have taken too long and possibly have been too expensive for killing all the artillery they might encounter.) This meant that the tripods were at a minor disadvantage in the water, as ships had more and better artillery and greater mobility than land forces; of course, they were even more vulnerable to the heat rays. A naval ship proved able to kill two Martian tripods, though, so the Martians would have had difficulty leaving Britain, had they not been building flying machines.

10. There was a sequel. But Wells didn't write it. More on that tomorrow.

-Signing off.

3 comments:

Menshevik said...

Ad 4.
While invasion literature was popular at the time, it was not exactly reality-based. The idea of an land force large enough to mount a successful invasion of Britain slipping past the Royal Navy really is pretty absurd and pretty much ingored certain realities of modern warfare, such as the necessity of keeping an army supplied with ammunition etc. So I am not sure if it isn't an insult to Wells to say that his knowledge of military tactics and technology came primarily from such dubious sources. The British army of the era was quite esteemed, espeicially as it consisted of professional soldiers, but it was simply too small to mount an invasion against a major power like Germany, France, or Russia. (In World War I, even a considerably expanded British army only attempted (and failed) in an invasion of a second-rate power like Turkey in conjunction with French and ANZAC forces). But that does not mean that the British army would have been unable to defend the British Isles against invading forces (in conjunction with the RN, of course), since, as Clausewitz pointed out, on a strategic level the defensive is stronger than the offensive and quite often a small army can hold off a numerically but not technologically superior one for a long time. (Consider e.g. the Boer Wars and the showing of the Serbian army in the first year of World War 1).
One respect in which Wells differs from most "invasion literature" scenarios is that his Martians are technologically supremely superior to the defending forces. Which reversed the situation you had in the colonial wars of the era, where small forces equipped with rapid-firing rifles and machine-guns were able to wipe out forces many times their number. (There may have been setbacks like Isandhlwana and Little Bighorn, where the "savages'" bravery and superior numbers prevailed, but these would only delay the inevitable outcome).

Menshevik said...

ad 5.
Actually, I'd say it is very much a coincidence that "Dracula" was published a year before War of the Worlds (of course if one wanted to, "Dracula" too could be interpreted as part of the "invasion literature" as it tells the story of a vampiric invasion of Britain and it ties in with the paranoid fantasies of armies of foreign agents in Britain waiting to strike in many invasion novels). The vampire genre in literature had been a going (minor) concern since the early 19th century (Christabel, The Vampyre, Carmilla). As for "Dracula" and the Martians' blood-sucking as a methaphor for Britain and its empire, I find this interpretation a bit forced. For one thing, Britain's success depended on trade going both ways, so people at the time would not have seen the relationship as "vampiric". For its "lifeblood" Britain also often depended on countries outside the Empire, for instance during the Napoleonic Wars on lumber from Russia and Scandinavia, during World War 1 on foodstuff and many other things from the US. Also, as far as keeping order in the dominions was concerned, that really was more the province of the British army and of forces recruited within those dominions. (Let's also not forget that Canada (and Newfoundland), Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all became self-governing nations before World War 1 and in many respects were perfectly able to pursue interests of their own).

Of course the really amazing literary coincidence is that the year before Wells' "War of the Worlds" another book about an invasion of Earth by Martians had been published in Germany, Kurd Lasswitz's "Auf zwei Planeten" (On Two Planets, vide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurd_Lasswitz). However, Lasswitz's Martians were not just technologically, but also morally more advanced than the inhabitants of Earth, and so they in the end wind up cooperating with them.

ad 7.
Cannons would be impractical for launching objects into space, but at the time they must have seemed the best bet considering that back then rockets were considerably less accurate. At the time it apparently was more "realistic" to consider anti-gravity devices instead, as Wells did in "First Men in the Moon" and Lasswitz had his Martians do in "On Two Planets".

Invid said...

1. Of course "invasion literature" wasn't terribly realistic, it was based on paranoia. The "military tactics" etc. stuff that I was referring to was the actual hardware and battlefield setup, etc. (Also, keep in mind that strictly speaking, this blog is more of an entertainment blog than a historical blog-if I mention history, it's for context and usually pulled from my fairly unreliable memory.

If the Royal Navy wasn't in the equation, though, an invasion would have been inevitable. And of course, since they were falling from the sky, the Martians were bypassing the Navy...

2. Well, no, I didn't think Stoker was making that parallel, I think Wells was. The Martians being a representation of the British Empire, I tend to think their vampirism was symbolic that way. Dracula obviously was a metaphor for a rather subtler invasion, on the other hand, and I'm not the person who made this connection-the guy who wrote the foreword for the edition of Dracula I bought for my Horror Lit class did.

That sort of symbolism really was beyond Stoker, too-according to my Horror Lit teacher, Stoker was really just a hack who managed to make something pretty brilliant and memorable.

I've never heard of "Auf Zwei Planeten" before-I'll have to look into it a bit further.

3. Well, yes, rockets probably didn't look like a good option back then. I'm just a little surprised nobody realized that the rocket principle could potentially be used for steering. (I think if someone were to make a contemporary depiction of Wells' Martians, not looking into this aspect would be something of an oversight. Of course, few people who write such things give a hoot as to the mechanics of space travel...)

4. Of course, anything I type is subject to being at least partially my opinion or colored by my opinions.