Vast And Cool, Yet Sympathetic

Cover by Harry Willock, 1971. Click for a better jpeg.

When I revisit favourite stories of the past, nostalgia never plays a part. I assess everything now by whatever standards I have learned to use, and for this reason, many old favourites no longer speak to me. Still, many do, and some of them expand when revisited, to show more facets and more nuance than I had seen before.

I first read The War of the Worlds when I was nine years old; reading it now, I feel the same pleasure of discovery. I could write about its layers of theme: about its unsettling idea that natural selection will continue within a technological society, when our machines become the environments to which we adapt; about ecological succession, and the changing of the biosphere by invasive, opportunistic species; about the parallels between Martian colonists and British imperialism, conveyed not by satire, but by analogy; about the failure of a bourgeois society to anticipate the shocks and upheavals of the future that plunges toward them.

These concepts are presented in the book not merely in subtext, but by explication; they add a troubling richness that goes beyond mere story-telling. For my purposes, however, I want to look at the story, because here, in his narrative techniques, Wells has achieved remarkable things.

The War of the Worlds is not presented as a novel, but as a romance. This liberates the story from the baggage of a novel's emphasis on characterization, and gives the book a drive, a momentum, that most novels could never match. All we know of the protagonist's life before the story begins is that he writes philosophical essays, and this is all we need to know; what matters more than background, here, is what the character thinks, feels, and does.

Instead of giving details about the narrator's past, Wells puts us inside the narrator's mind. We experience what he sees and fears; the result is an immersion into the storm-lit clarity of nightmare:
 

Flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.

Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.

I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd. All I felt was that it was something very strange. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire, and every dry furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away towards Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden buildings suddenly set alight.

It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the sand pits the dark ground smoked and crackled.

Wells maintains this dreamlike mood even during the speculations about Martian biology, and he makes the lectures as compelling as the dangers. These lectures never stop the story, because they retain the vividness and foreboding of the story itself.

One secret of this clarity is the reliance on physical details and visual impressions, even during the lectures. Wells could have mired himself in abstraction, but his love for the tactile, his passion for the everyday world around him, brings to life his creatures from another world.
 

We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines,our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent -- the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels.... Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast journey across space.

Cover by George Underwood, 1975. Click for a better jpeg.

Wells presents his concepts, makes analogies, links the strangeness of his war to scenes and habits of everyday life, to things that we can touch and see. His concepts drive the plot, from the effect of Martian weapons on terrified human beings, to the ecological rise and fall of the Red Weed -- a cycle of robust growth followed by infection and ruin, with hints of what lies in store for the Martians. At the same time, his intense focus on the psychological storms of the narrator anticipates the methods of William Sansom and J. G. Ballard, who would also emphasize a stripped-down, clinically physical approach to their characters.

In its power and economy of means, The War of the Worlds can remind readers that other methods are available for science fiction, and that, in abandoning the streamlined forms of romance for the bloated realism of the novel, science fiction lost a compelling way to tell stories. Less is often more, and a sharp focus often reveals finer details than are seen by a panoramic view. For this argument, Wells provides a living set of reasons.