The Human Future Invades Earth in The War of the Worlds

“To think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that sent one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant.”
H.G. Wells: In the Days of the Comet

Though the space alien invasion is now a familiar story type, The War of the Worlds is the first one known. To create it, Wells combined and transformed two popular topics of the time.

The first was the result of a growing anxiety across the western world. After decades of peace, European nations were taking advantage of new technologies and industries to make many new and more powerful weapons for mechanized war. In 1871 an anonymous pamphlet described a future invasion and conquest of England by a barely disguised Germany as if it had already happened. (The author was later identified as George Tomkyns Chesney, a former Captain of the Royal Engineers.)

“The Battle of Dorking” became a sensation throughout Europe. It inspired a spate of similar novels dramatizing invasions of one country by another that were still appearing in the late 1890s.

Another popular topic was the planet Mars. What geology was to the first years of the 19th century, astronomy became to its last decades. Bigger and better telescopes and new instruments led to discoveries that inspired public enthusiasm. So many amateur astronomy societies arose that the British Astronomical Association was formed to organize them in 1890.

Particular interest was focused on Mars, due to discoveries made each time its eccentric orbit brought it closer to Earth. As a result of his 1877 observations, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published maps of the Martian surface which showed a network of lines he called “channels.” But the Italian word (“canali”) got translated as “canals,” and since manmade canals were familiar features of the industrial age, a roar of speculation resulted concerning past or present intelligent life on Mars.

Mars was even closer in 1894, and American astronomer Percival Lowell professed to see even more evidence of canals, which he believed were the work of a civilization desperately trying to irrigate their drying planet.

Also that year, French astronomer Javelle reported “strange lights” on the Martian surface that might be signals. These were taken so seriously that eminences such as Edison, Marconi and Tesla tried to devise ways to signal back.

All of these sensational reports and the keen public interest they generated resulted in at least 50 novels about Mars and Martians.

None of the Mars novels or the invasion novels (with the possible exception of Chesney’s) were very good. But H.G. Wells saw the potential of putting these two topics together, in the first invasion from space story: The War of the Worlds, serialized in 1897 and published in book form in 1898...

Sometime in the early 20th century, a writer on the subject of moral philosophy in the future failed to see through his open study window the fall of an apparent meteor. He lived in the quiet English town of Woking, some 20 miles southeast of London. The meteor fell near the sand pits in the nearby Horsell Common.

He goes to see it, and is in the crowd when the Martians first appear, and witnesses the first deadly use of their heat ray. He is sufficiently alarmed to take his wife to a nearby town for safekeeping, in a borrowed horse-drawn cart.

At first it is believed the Martians are trapped in the pit, but when he gets back to Woking (to return the cart) he is confronted by their giant Fighting Machines, which stride through the countryside incinerating people and buildings with their now-mobile heat ray. Meanwhile, other cylinders are falling to Earth.

Those 1894 lights on the Martian surface, he surmises, were the first blasts of the guns that would send these cylinders across space in a planned invasion.

a more contemporary illustration

Soon the Martians use another weapon—the Black Smoke--which kills everything it touches, destroying all opposition as their giant machines advance. Our narrator flees, at first towards the town where his wife is. The story includes events witnessed by his brother in London itself.

Our chief narrator has encounters with two less than exemplary humans, the Curate and the Artilleryman, and witnesses the Martians feeding on the blood of live human victims.

With the human race on the run all around him, he blunders into London, where he watches the defeat of the otherwise indestructible Martians, by bacteria to which they have no resistance.

a 1915 illustration

Wells, who himself lived in Woking at the time he wrote The War of the Worlds, is exact in his use of real places and the actual topography throughout the book. This would have contributed powerfully to the effect on his first readers, but its specificity is still a key element in its absorbing narrative for readers unfamiliar with that time and place.

 Since the book was published in 1898 and takes place in the 20th century, it qualified as future history for those first readers as well.

Though it is clearly if subtly stated early in his account (and referred to later) that humanity survived the invasion, Wells’ precise description and evocative invention create a compelling and suspenseful narrative experience.

This novel ominously forecast the near future of warfare, from the poison gas of World War I to the effects of bombing and invasion of civilian areas (“Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal”) that would characterize World War II, lacking only the inhuman enemies from another planet.

It is also his first to foreshadow technologies of future weaponry—from manned flight to the laser-like heat rays—as well as still speculative uses of cybernetics and psychic communication.

The War of the Worlds repeats and extends several themes of The Time Machine. First, it continues Wells’ challenges to the complacency of his time. “The War of the Worlds like The Time Machine was another assault on human self-satisfaction,” he wrote in his preface to a 1934 collection of novels. Human mastery has not been attained and progress is not inevitable. In this case, humanity is challenged not by another species rising from beneath it on Earth, but by an alien species of greater power coming down from outer space.

To understand this possible fate, Wells suggests the people of his time and place might need to see things from another point of view, such as that of the invading Martians. Several times the narrator suggests understanding how the more advanced Martians might see humans by recalling how humans see ants or small animals.

1905

But the bolder shift is to imagine humans in the place of those animals: not as the dominant species, but as the suddenly dominated one. This again countered human complacency and the assumption of perpetual superiority, especially at the center of the British empire.

This act of imagination seems to have been the seeds of this story. As Wells recounted in a 1920 article of the Strand magazine, he was walking with his brother Frank “through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery.” They were probably talking about the indigenous inhabitants of Tasmania, an island south of Australia, who were nearly eradicated when the English turned the island into a prison colony. Then his brother wondered, what if some beings from another planet suddenly dropped out the sky and did that to England?

Frank Wells made the first imaginative leap, the empathy of placing himself in the position of another who is perceived to be very different. For this idea, H.G. dedicated the book to Frank, and made a very specific analogy early in the story: “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

There are several more references to oppressed people overrun by empires, and the theme is sounded early, with a clever use of the word “empire” and a reference to indigenous peoples such as American Indians and Africans who find themselves beset by missionaries:

“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.... At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.”

The Martians have as well the same excuse as humans of Wells’ time used: imperialism is actually natural selection. The Martian race was older and much more advanced. “And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars.” Again there is the Huxley version of a relentless evolutionary process, which only human ethics and empathy can counter.

But as advanced beings, wouldn’t Martians develop such ethics? This leads to a third theme—perhaps the most subtle and devastating. As an older race, the Martians have had longer to evolve. The beings they have become are physically simple, pretty much just a large head and hands (or more precisely, tentacles.) Though resilient, they are weak. Their strength is in their machines.

To make the game of identifying with the Other more explicit, Wells’ narrator notes that “a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition.”

That writer was Wells himself. In his 1893 article “Man of the Year Million” he speculated that, having long before delegated all physical activities to their machines, humans of the far future would become nothing but head and hands. Here he also suggests that with the body gone, the intelligence becomes unfeeling, like the Martians who in the famous opening paragraphs of The War of the Worlds are “intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic.”

This is the fate of humanity when it becomes dependent on technology. These Martians are us. Humanity is being conquered by its own future.

Like the Morlocks in The Time Machine, the Martians are technology-minded beings who raise a biped species as food—they use tubes to extract their blood. Eventually they then do the same to live humans: the first interplanetary vampires. (Bram Stoker’s Dracula was first published at about the same time as The War of the Worlds.) This is the sole relationship to organic life of this technologically dependent race.  Both the Morlocks and the Martians are versions of the human future.

This dehumanizing effect of technology is another theme that will become prominent in the twentieth century. Wells, the biologist and prophet of technology, explores the complex relationship of the machine and the organic in the lives and future of humanity and the Earth.

In The War of the Worlds, the war is won literally by the Earth itself, and by humanity’s long biological relationship to their planet. The Martian machines are defeated when the biological beings inside them die from infection by bacteria to which humans, after many generations of suffering and death, have become immune.

That in the end, it is the organic that saves humanity and the Earth, says quite a bit. It is first of all, almost literally grounding. It is evidence of the realities of dependence, of relationships to the Earth and its organisms that technological humans ignore, partly as expression of the same arrogance that leads to complacency, partly as denial.

With Wells, the machine enters literature as a given, as part of reality. The relationship of man and machine, the machine and nature, and generally the impact of science and technology on human life and the human future, would come to define a new kind of fiction.

Wells set the template for this kind of fiction with the novels and stories he wrote in the first decade of his career. He called them “scientific romances.” It would be nearly 30 years before they would be known by the name we call them today: science fiction.

Not all science fiction stories are directly about the future. But in one way or another, nearly every story about the future is within the realm of science fiction. Its unique history and status is essential to understanding how we confront the future.

To be continued.  For prior posts in this series, click on the Soul of the Future label below.

Hooray!

We've heard plenty about the fading away of the newspaper and the print magazine.  Many have gone under, others operate with pitifully few reporters, and even the biggest and strongest have cut their bureaus and foreign staff severely, resulting in terrible news coverage of much of the world, which apparently now includes Puerto Rico.  The hurricane aftermath coverage has been scandalous.

Thanks largely to the Internet, few get paid to report and write.  That's the bottom line for the journalism profession.  When you can't make a living doing it, it mostly doesn't get done.

Nevertheless--the press is not all gone.  Newspapers exist and reporters do good work.  The Pulitzer Prizes celebrate some of this, and this year's include the usual prizes for the big guys, the New York Times and the Washington Post, that are well-deserved, at least partly due to the fact that they can still pay people.

But there are other organizations that got prizes.  Some of them are national and international (the Reuter's news service, USA Today working with the Arizona Republic newspaper), New York Magazine and the New Yorker.  But also the most endangered species, the city newspaper.

So special congratulations to the Press Democrat (Santa Rosa), the Cincinnati Enquirer (pictured above, getting the news of their staff win), the Alabama Media Group, the Des Moines Register editorial writer, and the Daily Progress in Charlottesville.

And a big shout-out to the one and only freelance reporter to win: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, writing for GQ.  Share the joy!  Here's the New York Times list of all the winners, including the non-press prizes.

After The Time Machine: More Dangerous Futures

“...in the prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown.”
Charles Dickens
in a letter 1843

"In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow."
H.G. Wells 1894

“What have my books been from The Time Machine to World Brain and my Fate of Homo Sapiens but the clearest insistence on the insecurity of progress and the possibility of human degeneration and extinction? I think the odds are against man but it is still worth fighting against them.”
H.G. Wells 1939

For the first time in The Time Machine, the future is described as a direct consequence of the past—not through the intercession of magic or as reward or punishment from a deity, but according to the logic of cause and effect. After this immediately popular tale, virtually all stories about the future—and most rational thought—take this as their assumed premise. In this novel, Wells created our axiomatic future: the future evolves.

The crucial supporting point he makes is that the future is not assured by any dominant interpretation of the present. The reigning powers and the cultural consensus, emboldened by a quick, simplistic and self-serving interpretation of Darwinian evolution, foresaw inevitable progress for the human species. Wells demonstrates that this isn’t necessarily so.

In The Time Machine, Wells specifically attacked erroneous readings of Darwin. This novel dramatized the possibility of not progress but the retrogression of the human species.  But it was not the first nor the last time he wrote about this possibility.

contemporary speculation on what a further evolved
rat might look like.

In several articles he wrote in the 1890s, Wells warned that humans as the top species was itself not guaranteed: other species could conceivably develop to challenge humanity.

 He expressed this most succinctly and eloquently in his essay “The Extinction of Man,” published in 1894 while he was finishing The Time Machine: "In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow."

Wells suggested that even existing species could someday overcome human dominance. In “Zoological Retrogression”(1891) he wrote that Nature may be "in unsuspected obscurity, equipping some now humble creature with wider possibilities of appetite, endurance, or destruction, to rise in the fullness of time and sweep homo away into the darkness from which his universe arose.”

In an 1894 essay, “The Rate of Change in Species,” he notes that “The true heirs of the future are the small, fecund, and precocious creatures…” able to adapt to large scale changes in climate or environment. In “The Extinction of Man,” he names four kinds of small creatures that could displace humanity: crustaceans, cephalopods, plague bacilli, and ants.

He also wrote several short stories dramatizing this possibility, including “Empire of the Ants” in 1905: A small gunboat is sent up the Amazon river to investigate reports of a plague of ants. The captain is insulted by the ridiculous assignment but the science-minded engineer is curious. The reports mention “a new sort of ant,” somewhat like the leaf-cutting ants in that they act with purpose and appear to obey leaders. “He perceived the ants were becoming interesting,” Wells writes, “and the nearer he drew to them the more interesting they became.”

Eventually the gunboat crew confronts the uncommonly large ants, which are equipped with a natural poison capable of killing humans, as well as the intelligent leadership and learning ability to use it strategically. After the ants kill his lieutenant, the hapless captain can’t think of anything to do but shoot his gun meaninglessly into the forest, and escape.

Telling the story back in England, the engineer reports, "These are intelligent ants. Just think what that means!" They deploy so effectively that they crossed water and other barriers to take control of a large area of the Upper Amazon, causing "the flight or slaughter of every human being in the new areas they invade." Information is scarce because "no eye-witnesses of their activity…has survived the encounter." The story's narrator suggests these intelligent ants will reach Europe by 1960.

It is not one of Wells’ best stories (though not as bad as the 1977 movie with Joan Collins that shares little with the story but the title.) It is intriguing however for how closely it resembles a Joseph Conrad story, especially “The Heart of Darkness.” Wells and Conrad were friends, and Wells’ son Anthony wrote that HG had wanted to write something in the manner of Conrad, which may be how The Island of Doctor Moreau began.

Both “Empire of the Ants” and “The Heart of Darkness” are accounts of voyages in a small boat down a remote river through disorienting jungle wilderness, to investigate some unusual trouble far from the centers of civilization. They even have a scene in common: the shooting of a big gun randomly into the forest, at no particular target (something that Conrad had actually observed along the coast of Africa in 1890.) Both stories are told by a participant, but back in England.

Ants threaten humanity to some degree already in several parts of the world, so they aren’t a bad choice for eventual domination, especially since small creatures like ants are most likely to thrive in a hotter world. But in his fiction, Wells also suggests a different source for a suddenly overpowering species: outer space.

His celebrated 1898 novel The War of the Worlds dramatized the conquest of humanity by a technologically superior species from the planet Mars. But once again, as in The Time Machine, Wells was asking his readers to peer into another possible human future.

To be continued.  For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.

The Cure for Bad News Is-- Worse News?

If you're climate science literate and/or you've read Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in Washington trilogy (more recently republished in a shorter one volume form as Green Earth), and/or if you've seen the climate crisis movie The Day After Tomorrow, you got the significance right away, and it's big: the Atlantic ocean current (including the Gulf Stream) is slowing down, according to a study published in the peer reviewed science journal Nature.

If you read the abstract, you see this has probably been happening for some time, but it's now that researcher confirm that the climate crisis is a cause.  And its impact is potentially immense.  If the current shuts down or even slows considerably, weather in Europe and at least half of the US changes rapidly and radically.

NBC quotes one of the authors:
"We know somewhere out there is a tipping point where this current system is likely to break down," said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "We still don't know how far away or close to this tipping point we might be. ... This is uncharted territory."

Right now the current is slower than it has been in 1600 years, and predictions of what that means happen to comport with what has been actually happening the past few years.

Perhaps Steve Hanley's semi-hysterical report in Clean Technica is more appropriate:

"...While the world is absorbed in high dramas about trade wars, Syrian chemical attacks, whether Germany can extend the lifetime of diesel-powered cars, or the latest tweet from the White House, we are missing the implications of what is happening in the Atlantic Ocean...."

"Think of AMOC as the cooling system in a car with an internal combustion engine. When operating normally, engine temperatures stay within a range that permits continuous operation indefinitely. Reduce the flow of coolant significantly and what happens? Disaster. And here’s the crux of the matter. When that disaster strikes, it happens all at once with little to no warning. One minute you’re motoring along enjoying the view. The next minute you own a useless lump of metal. That, friends, is a tipping point — a clear demarcation between “then” and “now.”

"The results could be catastrophic for Europe. Not only will winters become significantly colder, but heat waves in the summer will also be more frequent. Hello? Is this not precisely what happened on the continent in the past 12 months?! Is anyone listening?! Does anyone care?! What’s that? What about Hillary’s emails? Never mind. Go back to sleep. Nothing to see here. Move along."

Henley emphasizes Europe (his audience) but at least parts of the US are also imperiled.  Rapid sea level rise is a particular danger for the East Coast. Henley's piece has good graphics to explain all this, and even some "cautious optimism."

Meanwhile you can check out the KSR book to see what the beginning of this might feel like in Washington (for instance.)  The kicker is that it may result in really frigid cold spells.  Start making your iceballs to bring to the floor, you moronic R members of Congress!  At least then you'll have an excuse for burning the Constitution--to keep your worthless butts from freezing off.

Today?

It didn't happen Friday, and it may never happen.  But it still looks like it will.

When bombers or big guns behind the lines pound an area before troops advance, it's called "softening up."  Right now Fox News is softening up its public with a continuous barrage of lies and hate directed at Robert Mueller, the deputy attorney general Rosenstein and to an extent, the AG Jeff Sessions.  Not to mention (of course) former FBI director Comey, who is considered proof that the FBI is conspiring against the antipresident.  The antipresident already fired Comey, and it looks like he will try to fire Mueller, even if indirectly by firing Rosenstein or Sessions.

It's either that or just the usual Fox fulminations of those powerless to do anything else, except perhaps try to save a few R seats in November.

Time is running out, though.  NBC reported last week that Mueller's report on obstruction of justice is imminent.  The longer Mueller goes, the deeper into the justice system he gets, and the harder it will be to root out everything he started.

Meanwhile, the antipresident is enjoying what he may perceive as a win on the Syria bombing, and weirdly good approval numbers, at least for his usual low range.  So maybe today.  Almost certainly, if it's ever going to happen, it will be soon.