War Of The Worlds

Study Guide for H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds

Introduction

War of the Worlds was written in response to several historical events. The most important was the unification and militarization of Germany, which led to a series of novels predicting war in Europe, beginning with George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871). Most of these were written in a semi-documentary fashion; and Wells borrowed their technique to tie his interplanetary war tale to specific places in England familiar to his readers. This attempt at hyper-realism helped to inspire Orson Welles when the latter created his famed 1938 radio broadcast based on the novel.

John Gosling's site on the broadcast.

There was a specific event that inspired Wells. In 1894 Mars was positioned particularly closely to Earth, leading to a great deal of observation and discussion. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had reported seeing "canali" on Mars, meaning "channels," but the term was mistranslated as "canals," leading to much speculation about life on the red planet. [Although scientists were able eventually to photograph what seem to be large stream beds on Mars, these are on a much smaller scale than the blobs and blotches which misled Schiaparelli into thinking he had seen channels.] One of the 1894 observers, a M. Javelle of Nice, claimed to have seen a strange light on Mars, which further stimulated speculation about life there. Wells turned Javelle into Lavelle of Java, an island much on people's minds because of the explosion there in 1883 of Mount Krakatoa, which killed 50,000 people and drastically influenced Earth's climate for the next year.

Wells became famous partly as a prophet. In various writings he predicted tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, and--in this novel--gas warfare, laser-like weapons, and industrial robots. It was his tragedy that his most successful predictions were of destructive technologies, and that he lived to experience the opening of the atomic age in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wells was to become famous as a socialist and a utopian, but his science fiction novels are almost uniformly pessimistic about human nature and the future.

There is an excellent DVD-ROM entitled Mars: The Red Planet, which provides further background information, video interviews with experts, and a wealth of other material relevant to the study of Wells' novel and other Martian SF. To read more about this resource and get some sample and auxiliary materials, go to the Mars, The Red Planet Web site.

Part I

Chapter 1: The Eve of the War

From what perspective is humanity viewed? What qualities in the Martians make them dangerous to humanity? Mars' reddish color led to speculation that it had at one time held more oxygen in its atmosphere, now locked up in iron oxide. Wells' treatment of it as an old and nearly-exhausted world was commonplace at the time he was writing, and his adoption of this view influenced much later Martian fiction. The American bison seemed poised on the brink of extinction in 1898, though it has since been brought back; but the dodo was entirely killed off by English explorers of Mauritius in the 17th Century, becoming in fact synonymous

synonymous with extinction, as in the expression "dead as a dodo." In the 18th Century the British almost eliminated the native inhabitants of Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia, when they turned it into a penal colony. Wells several times draws parallels between the Martians' treatment of Earth and Britain's treatment of its colonies. The use of gigantic guns rather than rockets to launch space vehicles may have been inspired by Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865). In Orson Welles' production, the narrator is Ogilvy, the astronomer, introduced against the background of the ticking clockwork described here. What effect does it have on the novel to have an ordinary, unnamed narrator, not technically trained and often far from the center of activity? What irony is created by the topic of the series of papers he is writing? The bicycle had been recently invented, and Wells was learning how to ride one during the writing of the novel.

Chapter 2: The Falling Star

In the second paragraph, what evidence is there that Wells is trying to avoid making his narrator a perfect observer? Why do you suppose he does this? How is Ogilvy's first reaction to the movement of the cylinder top ironic? In the absence of broadcasting , the telegraph was the fastest means of communication, and ordinary people received the news by one of several different editions of newspapers during the day. What error do the first reports of the landing make?

Chapter 3: On Horsell Common

What methods does Wells use to make these events seem realistic?

Chapter 4: The Cylinder Unscrews

What is a Gorgon, and why might Wells have chosen to compare the Martians to one? In what way does Wells make his narrator distinctly unheroic?

Chapter 5: The Heat-Ray

X-rays were discovered by Roentgen in 1895; and novelists immediately began imagining all manner of other rays which could be used as weapons; but Wells is probably thinking here as well of ancient accounts of "Greek fire" projected against enemies to terrifying effect. What is the narrator's reaction to the attack?

Chapter 7: How I Reached Home

Wells' description of psychic numbing as a result of trauma seems very modern. Why is it important that the narrator not be an omnicompetent swaggering hero in the Arnold Schwarzenegger mold? What seems to be the narrator's attitudes toward working class people? Gravity acts "like a cope of lead" on the Martians; this phrase recalls the punishment of hypocrites in Canto 23 of Dante's Inferno, (read the excellent Mandelbaum translation online) in which the damned are forced to wear weighty leaden capes. What does this following phase imply about the state of the world after the Martian invasion: "in those days even philosophical writers had many little luxuries"? How does Wells once again compare the Martian invasion to British colonialism?

Chapter 8: Friday Night

"Canard" usually