The War of the Worlds

H.G. Wells 1897 science-fiction classic War of the Worlds has been adapted countless times. Most notable are the 1953 film, Spielberg’s 2005 version, Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play, and the latest stellar BBC rendition. It's about humanity being attacked by aliens; the archetypal story of the alien invasion plot so present and popular in modern media and science-fiction. It’s the first of its kind.

Interestingly, every adaptation follows a different cast of characters; only the alien invasion and parts of the plot stay relatively consistent. The setting also changes, typically to be more relevant to contemporary life. Instead of Victorian England, it’s 1953 California or Edwardian England, for example. This is an unusual way to handle adaptations. The story concludes with a twist, this being that, for all of their might and technological superiority, they are defeated at the film's end by Earth bacteria.

The book is said to be somewhat of an allegory, with the stories's aliens standing in for colonizers. The Spielberg adaptation compounded this by tying it into contemporary fears regarding the War on Terror; everyday people living their lives until being hit with traumatic shock (from them, out of nowhere) and are then, forced to fend for their lives in this new world where everything goes to chaos. The randomness of the conflict emphasized with the fear of facing an enemy so powerful and advanced, like the Martians and their tripods.

It’s the element that there is a party causing this societal distress that distinguishes the alien invasion genre from the zombie genre. The former is typically with a definitive ‘villain’, but the latter not so much, although some zombie stories deal with an antagonist that created the zombification. Both also deal with the distressing truth of human nature; this is that intense stress creates moral relativism. People will do unsavoury things to survive, things that would never fly in a ‘civilized’ society. 

H.G. Wells has written a number of influential books, including the Invisible Man and the Time Machine. (Interesting bit of trivia: he was praised by Winston Churchill and also called George Orwell a ‘shit’.) He was a futurist, also being quite progressive for his time. He was a socialist, believing in equality, ecological conservationism, and human rights, and was also anti-racism and anti-eugenics, though this was not always the case.

War of the Worlds is a historic commentary, and it was also influenced by the genocide of the Tasmanians. H.G. Wells himself said.

"And before we judge them (the Martians) too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished Bison and the Dodo, but upon its own inferior races. 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?”

As we can see, he’s basically saying that humanity at the time had no right to judge the Martians, because they too, were guilty of the same crime.

Some other thoughts

• There’s an additional level of horror, mystery, and intrigue to the story, given that we never know what the aliens were thinking or what their plans were. Why, in the 2005 version, were tripods buried underground Earth? Why are they killing people, but also using them as food? Why did they come to Earth in the first place?

• In a famous story, a radio play adaptation caused a panic because people thought the alien invasion was real. It’s now believed that the incident was exaggerated by media, but it’s nonetheless a captivating semi-hysteria.