Wells sort of made a bet and wanted to have it covered both ways: in which shape will Apocalypse come?

Humanity wiped out by super-humans ruling over invincible machines?

Or wiped out by a tiny bacteria?

Choose your ending! And enjoy a vintage science fiction writer while you wait ...

“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.”

Read for the 2015 Reading Challenge: #41 A book by an author you've never read before n  stupidly haven't read before I should sayn And for my 2015 Reading Resolutions: 5 classics (5/5) :’D completed!!

Excellent. Not just very interesting for all the technology and science it has, but outstanding in describing human behavior and criticizing its time. Very thrilling at parts, philosophically emotional at others and overall, well written. Highly recommended for any sci-fi fan. The ending might be a little Deus Ex Machina for some, but I love simple endings that make sense. Wells indeed a very good storyteller.



n  “En los últimos años del siglo diecinueve nadie habría creído que los asuntos humanos eran observados aguda y atentamente por inteligencias más desarrolladas que la del hombre y, sin embargo, tan mortales como él; que mientras los hombres se ocupaban de sus cosas eran estudiados quizá tan a fondo como el sabio estudia a través del microscopio las pasajeras criaturas que se agitan y multiplican en una gota de agua.”n


Lo que mas me gusto de este libro es que no solo es “un ataque alienígena” lo que esta describiendo el autor, si no que usa este concepto para explicar realidades del ser humano. Lo más interesante de esta historia es cuando fue escrita, porque impactan más ciertos pasajes.

El libro es una mezcla de muchas cosas, filosofía, supervivencia, intriga, tácticas de guerra, suspenso, desastre, incluso un poco de gore podría decir. Hay ciertas escenas bastante asquerosas de imaginar. Para ser un libro tan corto y rápido, cada trama se maneja muy bien porque no tiene ni una palabra de relleno. La escritura es bastante intensa de forma inteligente y sin sobredramatismo. Tiene grandes descripciones para ser admiradas por cualquier fan del hard sci-fi. Sobretodo lo referente al final del libro.

n  “y en los marcianos tenemos la prueba innegable de la supresión del aspecto animal del organismo por la inteligencia”n

Recomendado, especialmente si traes ganas de un buen classico sci-fi. Pero pasa de el si no te va mucho la vena psicológica. Este NO es un libro de acción.


n  "Quizá el futuro les pertenezca a ellos y no a nosotros."n

Me costaron mucho trabajo los primeros capítulos porque no me gustan las cosas de alienígenas, pero después, la verdad es que se convierte en una historia casi de terror con todas las descripciones de muerte y destrucción. Hay escenas super tensas en las que el protagonista se está escondiendo de los marcianos y siento que muchísimas películas han intentado replicar (me vino a la mente the quiet place por ejemplo). Impresiona muchísimo que este libro se haya escrito en 1898, cuando lo empecé y leía las descripciones de los ataques pensaba: seguro el autor se inspiró en la Primera Guerra Mundial, PERO LO ESCRIBIÓ ANTES! Insisto, aunque las historias de invasiones alienígenas no son mi tema, reconozco que La Guerra de los Mundos caminó para que muchas de las historias de terror y ciencia ficción que conocemos hoy pudieran correr. Vale la pena. (Gracias a Marina de mi club de lectura por proponerlo porque si no nunca lo habría leído).

dnf@50%

With all of the recent talk about Mars, one has to be reminded that this novel was written 120 years ago and by someone who had little formal training but great curiosity, facts that cause The War of the Worlds to stand as an even more impressive achievement. H.G. Wells was destined for a life as an apprentice in the trades during the Victorian era in Great Britain when social mobility was almost nil.



Yet, having been accepted at a school that admitted some bright working class students and under the tutelage of T.H. Huxley, Wells's great curiosity was whetted and he was driven to excel, using his considerable imagination to construct novels & non-fiction works, many of which continue to fascinate readers. Wells even co-authored a Biology textbook with Huxley, his former tutor and someone whose keen study of science and promotion of modern ideas caused him to be called "Darwin's bulldog".

What captured my interest with this rereading of a classic book was the manner in which Wells looks at the looming catastrophe that besets the people of Woking, a small English village, eventually expanding to London & potentially the entire civilized world when cylinders from the planet Mars crash into the rural English countryside. Initial curiosity & a sense of disbelief are quickly transformed into toxic fear & general chaos as the local police & even the Cardigan Hussars prove to be no match for the squid-like Martians that crawl from the cylinders and their quickly devised tripods unleashing deadly rays.

When I first came upon this story by Wells, it was via a Classics Illustrated booklet with wonderful graphics and the suggestion at the end that one should next pursue the original edition, available at one's local library, which I did somewhat later, being an easy mark for stories set in far-off countries and even those extraterrestrial adventures even farther beyond one's home. Reading The War of the Worlds much later in life, I was much more attracted to the words Wells employed to drive his story.



Specifically, he uses two different visions in the novel, one microscopic and the other telescopic. The author uses his knowledge of microbes and how the bacilli that have long beset humanity with various diseases and plagues ultimately vanquish the Martians. Beyond that, he employs his own interest in exploring the solar system as a context for setting a story that few in the late 1890s could have envisioned.

Wells also implants various characters, each of whom reacts to the Martian menace in a different manner. There is for example, an extremely addled cleric who acts as a foil for the main character & who is eventually slain by him while they are both holed up in the remnants of a house destroyed by Martians. But, the author also distinguishes between what he labels "fetish, heathen prayers" and a more validly focused kind that might serve to bring one through a crisis. The narrator comments that he had come "face to face with the darkness of God."

Another character, an artillery man comments that "the game is up & we are beat--cities, nations, progress, civilizations, it's all over." And yet, this fellow speaks of attempting to preserve books & scientific knowledge, eventually hoping to master the Martians.

It is said that Wells himself fluctuated between a cautious optimism and a persuasion of looming, irretrievable global disaster. I enjoyed reading this tale again, attempting to imagine how the author's original readers might have reacted and being familiar with how Orson Welles fashioned The War of the Worlds into an American setting, one that set many in the U.S. on edge via a radio dramatization in 1938.



There is a point when Wells has the narrator come to the realization that he has felt...

like a rat leaving his hiding place, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim, our masters might have hunted & killed. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominions.

There are some fairly obscure words within the novel and a rather constant notation on the towns, streets & byways traversed by the Martians and those fleeing in their wake. My edition included a convenient map to use, much as one might while traveling about London and the U.K. and I found this helpful.

In a forward to my edition by Brian Aldiss, it is indicated that H.G. Wells was never really accepted by intellectuals, who never took to the author as a "literary force." Aldiss indicates that Wells was serious but also liked to have fun, enjoying wine & women but that the literary establishment "lacked his claret & his clarity", not a bad summing up in my view.

In 1933, Wells wrote a fantasy work with "futurist implications", The Shape of Things to Come, but in no way anticipated the horror of Nazi Germany, WWII & the Holocaust. As George Orwell put it: "He got many things wrong, being too sane a man to anticipate or understand 20th century craziness, with the world having outstripped his imagination".

*Within my review are photo images of: H.G. Wells; the cover of the Classics-Illustrated edition of War of the Worlds; and the image of Wells creating a mini-war games scenario, perhaps a precursor of today's war-game videos.

**A very interesting article on H.G. Wells, Passion & Prophecy: The War Within H.G. Wells, written by Adam Gopnik, appeared in the November 22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, with emphasis on Wells' rather open approach to sexuality.

Wow. I knew this, but I didn't KNOW this, until I re-read his 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds: H.G. Wells was eerily and impressively ahead of his time.

I'll admit, The War of the Worlds was hardly an easy read. The dispassionate and overly formal style of writing/reporting constantly dragged me back to a long ago time and place almost as foreign as Mars itself. His "speculative philosophy", as he put it, interweaving themes of colonialism and the subjugation of humankind as a whole, was evidently political in its foundation. But it was fascinating to recognize he also set the stage for 20th century speculative and science fiction. As a sci-fi junkie, I am grateful for his ingenious contribution to this genre.

Especially remarkable were artilleryman's imaginings, which are remarkably familiar to any reader of 20th century speculative or science fiction. The artilleryman posits a Martian-controlled future, where humans survive underground (figuratively and literally) and carve out a rebellious life. He envisions humanity playing the part of an inferior or even insignificant race to the alien overlords, until such time we can develop the perfect opportunity to overthrow them. Fast forward A CENTURY, and we've got Skynet's Terminators bearing down on us.

So often I find myself searching for this week's (this minute's?) next great read, but what I need to be doing is seeking out more of the classics to add to my reading list. Each novel surprises and enlightens me in ways I never expected, and enriches my appreciation of those contemporary works I voraciously consume.

Wells invented cliches for a Hollywood blockbuster before Hollywood had any. He was truly a visionary: predicted all possible plot twist for the post-apocalyptic stories. Except one - in his book aliens attacked Britain not the USA.

“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; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

A beautiful opening to the book but I must say the Martians did a very poor job of scrutinising us human chappies and our little blue planet considering what transpires later. Ah, but I must not spoil the book even though I imagine most people reading this review (all three of them) already know how it ends. Which brings me to my next point, if you know the story of The War of The Worlds quite well already but have not actually read the book I urge you to read it, especially if you are a science fiction fan. I don't think there are many books in the pantheon of sci-fi as important as this one. This is the book that launched the alien invasion sci-fi trope and even manages to remain one of the best examples of it.

H.G. Wells was literally* light years ahead of his time, the mind boggles to think what he was able to conceive in the 19th century; alien invasion, time travel, genetic engineering, all these when TV sets are still decades in the future. If historical importance is not much of an inducement for you and you are just looking for a thumping good read Mr. Wells is also at your service here. The War of The Worlds is often thrilling, skillfully structured and narrated with some unexpected moments of philosophising and surreal dialogue. I generally find that Wells wrote much better prose than most of today’s SF authors do.

He even included some element of hard sf into his novels, here is an example from this book:

“It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light.”

Yes, you may already have a fairly good idea of The War of The Worlds’ beginning middle and end without ever reading the book but you would miss Wells’ marvelously immersive and visual storytelling and the subtexts embedded in the original texts. The scene of naval battle between the military’s ironclads and the Martian tripods is vividly depicted and should please fans of military sf and general badassery. The slightly surreal chapter involving the artilleryman is a particularly interesting depiction of people who always seem to be brimming with ideas, plans and suggestions but never actually do anything.

The story of The War of The Worlds is so potent that Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds 1938 radio broadcast “became famous for causing mass panic, although the extent of this panic is debated”. Still, even moderate panic is an amazing achievement for a radio drama.

This book has of course been adapted into movies several times. Unfortunately a straight adaptation complete with the Victorian setting does not seem to have been made. The most recent adaptation being the 2005 Spielberg directed movie with Tom Cruise being the usual Cruisian hero, dodging Martian heat rays like nobody's business.

For this reread I went with the free Librivox audiobook version, very well read by Rebecca Dittman.

I hope to eventually read all of Wells’ sci-fi and perhaps his more mainstream books also. Anyway, never dismiss H.G. Wells' sci-fi as old hat because he invented the hat and it is still superior to most of today's headgear.

* I have a bee in my bonnet about today's frequent (and incorrect) overuse of "literally".

A quick note about the ending:
The ending is the mother of all Deus Ex Machina, I suppose Wells may have written himself into a corner a bit here as Victorian Brits are never going to be much of a challenge for giant tripod riding aliens armed with heat rays and weird smoke guns.

I love this album cover art from Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. For some reason, I never heard the album in its entirety, but the hit single Forever Autumn is great.

Note:
• Update May 6, 2017: Now the Beeb is making a proper Victorian era adaptation, hurrah!

• Update June 22, 2020: Haven't seen the (above-mentioned) 2019 BBC series! LOL! There is also a 2019 French / US adaptation. Havn't seen that either!


"The Martians" by Rodney Matthews

There is considerable speculation that Wells (A) intended this short novel to be an asseveration on Darwinian natural selection. Wells himself was once a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, a man known affectionately (and scornfully) as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Whether or not that conjecture is true, it certainly fits the narrative.

It’s also speculated that this is (B) a slam on British colonialism, (C) an advocation for the rights of animals, and (D) a stab at religious fundamentalists. I doubt that Wells consciously set out to incorporate so many subliminal messages in this now classic sci-fi thriller.

A better explanation (in my humble opinion) is that Wells’ phenomenal ability to imagine real responses to surreal circumstances tends to bring our societal monsters (racism, exceptionalism, speciesism, etc.) out of the shadows.

Five Stars.

As I was reading this, two thoughts struck me.

The first was that this book was less about Martians than it was about how humanity views itself as the "Kings of the Earth". Mankind has always had this annoying tendency to think that whatever serves us is good and right, despite whatever injury is done to the Earth and any other living creature on it in obtaining whatever it is that we want. The Martian invasion served only to open our eyes to this blindness and willful ignorance.

I appreciated some of the artilleryman's ideas on cohabitation, in so far as he compared the surviving humans to rodents or small animals -- the Martians (as the "New Kings of the Earth") will let us be, as we mean them no harm-- unless they run out of food, that is. Isn't this really how animals must see us? I think so. Too bad that's not true... Humans will hunt, kill and exploit for the sport of it, not just for survival.

The invasion in the book awakens us to the fact that there is always someone bigger, badder and meaner out there to hunt humans as if we are now the animals.

But I digress!

My second thought was that it was really odd that all 7 of the mentioned Martian cylinders landed in England. I mean, even if we expand this to include Ireland, Scotland and Wales, we are talking about an area of 151,502 square miles. Compare this to Asia at 17,700,000 square miles or even Europe at 3,930,000 square miles. (Figures are from Google.)

About 3/4 through the book, it's mentioned that other cylinders are probably wreaking havoc on other parts of the world. I suppose it must be assumed that they had some trajectory and that the cylinders were shot at the same time each day to follow it, but then why only aim at one area if world domination is your goal?

In this one particular, I could not suspend my disbelief to allow for 7 out of 10 cylinders to hit such a small area of the planet.

I am probably over-thinking this... I feel better after getting all of that off of my chest though! I did really enjoy the story itself, and would definitely recommend it to anyone. It's short enough so that it is not a daunting read, but it contains such a large story that it is immensely entertaining.

n  n

A few days ago I have read this juicy article on a Portuguese magazine ("Visão"): 5th September...still missing 3290 days for a visit to Mars.

The article speaks about NASA's visit by 2030. Yet, a Dutch company* is preparing to anticipate NASA in a decade. A no-return voyage, vegetarians by force...and a water factory are some of the ideas approached.

To my knowledge, though thousands worldwide had already applied, there are 8 Portuguese people ready to embark; but only 4 of them disclosed their names. Ages between 19 and 42. Maybe one of them up there ...in 2023.


n  n


Dreams that never end,...Mr Wells.
-Martians, beware, it's "our turn"!



n  n

Yes, this is truly a classic of science fiction; a book first published in 1898.

It's about a Martian invasion: missiles launched from planet Mars carry strange creatures/machines inside...which, when out of its carrying cylinders, wreak havoc everyone and everything.

Truly, a paranoid vision of a planet close to ours: a place that receives only "half of the light" of the sun, and whose hardened-hearts inhabitants "carry warfare" sunward. They see our green planet...while theirs got cooled. And their "intelligences are greater than ours". They watch us keenly.

It's the end of the 19th century and astronomer Ogilvy at Ottershaw village, England, wonders about the "thing" they "were sending us". People used to scoffle at the idea of "Mars inhabitants": a vulgar one.

And then for 10 nights a flame was watched: and it happened: the falling star reached Earth!

Ogilvy tried to find it...though he had seen nothing. There was a thing buried on the ground: a hot huge cylinder in Horsell Cadron...it was 6 o'clock: and "there's a man inside it!".

But nobody believes this report. The cylinder was of a yellowish white metal...an unfamiliar one: extraterrestrial. Excavations start. Stent, the Astronomer Royal is called upon...so Lord Hilton, lord of the Manor.

n  n


Out of the cylinder came little tentacles, like a little grey snake....and then the bulk, that body mass...round eyes...arms like an octopus. There's horror around. An ungovernable terror is gripping the main character.


The Deputy attempted to communicate by holding a white flag ...but that group was swept of existence, it became a group of specks.

Fear.

From the cylinder emanates a flash of light, a greenish smoke...it's the light of destruction. "Three puffs of green smoke"...and the spinning mirror...the heat ray: forty people have died.

n  n

More troops are deployed, another cordon of soldiers....and a squadron of hussars...and a regiment of 400,...a second cylinder had fallen on Earth.


n  n

And yet, out of that area people carry on the routine. Some are curious to know how "they" live on another planet.

Ogilvy said that it's impossible for Martians to live on Earth: due to the excess of oxygen and the gravitation force here being 3 times higher than Mars'.

Meanwhile, the main character had his last civilized meal. Why hasn't the story been printed in a London paper yet?
...
n  n
("their things...")

n  n
n  n

("our things...")

*http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/22/wor...
http://www.mars-one.com/en/roadmap2015

UPDATES:
http://rt.com/news/158216-mars-one-wa...
(Girlfriend or Mars? RT interviews Mars One hopefuls)

One-way Ticket to Mars (RT Documentary) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfKzhj...

Group’s ‘Mars One’ Project Is ‘So Ambitious’ That Even the CEO Admits It’s Pretty ‘Crazy’
Aug. 25, 2015 8:58am in:http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/...

Sydney Do :“the analysis that we’ve made and the historical analysis that we’ve done, is that no, they cannot do this, and it is infeasible.”

http://marsmobile.jpl.nasa.gov/multim...

By the way, the (European) Schiaparelli Lander is about to touch down on Mars
19th October 2016
...
Sad news: it seems the Lander was "destroyed on impact".
24th October 2016


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...
Quite interesting testimony of these 3 volunteers, a Mozambican doctor, an Iraqi-American woman, and a UK Physicist.
Three volunteers are on the shortlist to be among four people on the Mars One programme:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/vide...
25th November 2017

UPDATE

It seems the mission is over. Pity.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...
7th May 2019.

Mars Attacks! BBC Unveils 'War of the Worlds' Trailer
in:
https://www.space.com/war-of-the-worl...


Covid-related UPDATE

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/epid...

Wells message for Greta Thunberg, in a quote from the book:

"The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour (Mars)".