Title The War of the Worlds Series --- Author H. G. Wells Illustrator Grahame Baker Publisher The Folio Society - 2004 First Printing 1897 Category Alien Invasion Warnings None Main Characters Unnamed narrator Main Elements Aliens

Title The War of the Worlds Series --- Author H. G. Wells Illustrator Dobbs, Vicente Cifuentes Publisher Insight Comics - 2018 First Printing Insight Comics - 2018

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.” Thus begins one of the most terrifying and morally prescient science fiction novels ever penned. Beginning with a series of strange flashes in the distant night sky, the Martian attack initially causes little concern on Earth. Then the destruction erupts—ten massive aliens roam England and destroy with heat rays everything in their path. Very soon humankind finds itself on the brink of extinction. H. G. Wells raises questions of mortality, man’s place in nature, and the evil lurking in the technological future—questions that remain urgently relevant in the twenty-first century.

(This Folio Society edition follows the text of the authoritative 1924 Atlantic Edition with minor emendations. Typeset in Founder's Caslon at The Folio Society. Printed on Caxton Wove paper by Memminger MedienCentrum and bound by Real Lachenmaier in full library buckram blocked with a design by the artist.)

The year 2022 is going to be my year of Science Fiction, I have been neglecting the genre in other years in preference for fantasy, and now I'm going to try to catch up a bit. And one of the ones I'm starting with is one of the earlier classic science fiction tales, The War of the Worlds.

The novel starts in a quiet village in England when strange objects fall from the sky. At first nothing happens as the metal cools but then it unscrews and tentacled aliens struggling against our greater gravity flop out. The locals try to welcome them, but the aliens have been busy putting together some equipment, a giant tripod stands up and starts firing heat rays as the onlookers, incinerating them. Our narrator narrowly escapes and realizes that the human race is in big trouble, especially as more cylinders fall in the ensuing days and more tripods start striding across the English countryside aiming right for London.

I had some vague idea what this tale was about before reading it, and I knew in advance how the aliens were defeated at the end...but see, I had just finished reading a whole pile of Asimov's robot stories, so somehow I was expecting Wells to be humorous. This tale was far from funny, it was all out apocalyptic, dead bodies everywhere, houses on fire, heat rays and black fogs, and the complete utter uselessness of late 19th century weaponry against the invaders. And then the worst, something I didn't know before, the aliens started collecting humans in baskets and using them as food. And this one poor character is running from village to village, house to house, sometimes trapped for weeks, watching his world be razed to the ground, the mighty British Empire! Eventually he's pretty much the only one still scavenging for food, the land is depressingly empty, colonized by a Martian plant the aliens accidentally brought along with them (how many times have humans accidentally transported a species from one place to another to the detriment of the native life).

Also, you realize how difficult it was for them to do anything, just a mere 125 years ago. The only way you got your news was through a newspaper, so information travelled very slowly. Radio was never mentioned, though the telegraph was used, but those lines of communication are easily destroyed. People wanted to run away, but cars were just beginning to be a thing so almost everyone was either on foot or on horse, with the occasional bicycle. Trains were easily stopped by wrecking the tracks. You have to remember WWI won't happen for another 20 years. If Wells were to write his story today it would be different in details only, even with our more advanced weapons you could always advance your hypothetical alien tech to the point we still couldn't stand up to them (there's the movie with Tom Cruise I'll watch soon that should do exactly this). But being a person living in a nuclear age, and tanks and fighter jets, I can all the more imagine the helplessness of the characters in Wells' novel back then.

I would have loved to have seen what the rest of the world was thinking. As usual in invasion/disaster stories it tends to be centered wherever the author is from, apparently England was the only place worth invading. But Europe must have been aware of what was going on, the novel wraps up by describing the aid coming to the British isles from around the world. Then again, without our modern internet, even things like WWII felt remote to the people in say North America. Sure they knew it was happening, and it affected their daily lives through scarcity, their men going off to fight, but otherwise you could be more or less oblivious to Europe riping itself apart. We still do that every day, what with all the wars raging and peope dying in Africa and we're worried that they cancelled our favorite type of coffee at the local Starbucks...hence the utter chaos and confusion Wells protrayed so well.

Wells does a decent job of making sure there was science in his science fiction, though the idea that Mars could have no bacteria is laughable, how could an advanced lifeforms evolve without there being bacteria around as the simplest and most robust form of life? But other things, the effects of gravity, or how sound must be different, he even considers how his aliens must have evolved into their current forms given the conditions on their Martian homeworld. There's even a little social commentary as our narrator considers how these aliens view us as animals, then thinks about how maybe this was a kind of poetic justice after what we've done to the lesser creatures of our world, or even the horrors we inflicted on our fellow humans.

I honestly didn't expect to be as impressed with this book as I was. It was legitimately scary.

May 2022

The library had a graphic novel version of the tale so gave it a try. On the whole it was ok, but I wasn't much impressed, though it stuck to the novel pretty well, and the art quality was good. I don't recall the aliens sending telepathic commands to people...I mean really "Resisting is futile"...are they the Borg? The tripods I thought didn't work at all, they looked like centipedes with three ribbons for legs, those ribbon legs didn't look like something one could even stand on, and most of the time really hard to see which kind of defeated the whole tripod effect (was one of the only things the Tom Cruise movie did very well). The main character's wife is apparently quite pregnant in one square, but look at all the others, she's unbelievably thin, so lack of overall consistency. I also had some issues with the clothing (the women's clothes, the uniforms) that just didn't feel authentic to the time/location. And finally it just couldn't capture the horror that the prose version could, it felt rushed because for all intents and purposes, the main character is just running around from place to place trying to avoid being killed, in essence not much of a plot, but the book allows for pauses, contemplation, more descriptions of the horror which somehow didn't come through in the illustrations, maybe my imagination is capable of so much more. The graphic novel is an action movie while the book is a psychological thriller. The book is much better.