I'd been meaning to read War of the Worlds by HG Wells for literal decades, but I kept putting it off. I'd seen enough of several movie adaptations to fool myself into thinking it was boring or too simplistic. Even the famous Orson Wells radio play didn't appeal to me, and I'm an Orson Welles fan. At long last however, a friend I know through mutual appreciation for the Cthulhu mythos told me I needed to read War of the Worlds because the aliens in it were surprisingly Lovecraftian. That was enough to intrigue me, so I opened the book, lost a week of my life, and emerged a serious (late blooming) fan of HG Wells.
This is my review of the book War of the Worlds, and it contains spoilers. It might seem silly to warn about spoilers for a book that's well over 100 years old, but if you've never read the book then trust me, you don't want it spoilt. You don't know War of the Worlds if you've only seen a handful of movie adaptations, or read a graphic novel adaptation. This is a book you need to read for yourself, and I have links to $0 copies (including an audio book) at the bottom of this post. Seriously, go read it!
Aliens
The thing that got me to finally read War of the Worlds were the aliens, and without question the alien design is one of the most intriguing and surprising elements of the book. Physically, the aliens in War of the Worlds are tentacle monsters that lumber through the comparatively extreme gravity of Earth. They don't speak, they don't try to deceive the humans of Earth, they don't threaten. It makes me wonder when the trope of little green men actually started, and whether it was possibly tied to when we first attempted to include extra-terrestrials in movies. Obviously early authors, like HG Wells and Dunsany and Lovecraft, imagined extra-terrestrial life as formless and aberrant beings completely foreign to human comprehension. It would have been difficult to express that in a movie, and also frankly probably too horrific for general audiences, and it must have seemed like a very reasonable compromise to just paint a guy green and give him a funny hat and call him a Martian. Those are explicitly not the aliens of War of the Worlds, though.
The creatures that come from Mars to Earth in War of the Worlds are totally inscrutable. We never learn their motivation, we don't learn even one syllable of their language, and we always see them from a distance. They're almost incidental to the story, except they're also the focus.
From the perspective of trying to comprehend tragedy, War of the Worlds is pure horror. There is no reason for this attack, and there is no reasoning with the attackers. Bad things are happening, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The narrative fully embraces this horror. Some people turn desperately to religion, other people become almost catatonic in their trauma, and still other people just try to survive in the wake of destruction.
Science fiction and horror
As science fiction goes, War of the Worlds is obviously an astonishingly early example. I think what's really surprising about it is just how exemplary it is. Many of the defining traits of SF are created here, in ways that are missing from earlier examples of SF like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Marie Corelli's Romance of Two Worlds (1886). (It's not lost on me that both of those examples were written by women, and I don't know what to make of that one way or another.)
War of the Worlds is as much apocalyptic horror as it is science fiction. It's one man's desperate flight from a force that he, or indeed the entire human race, cannot fight.
The aliens have lots of gadgets. They have interstellar ships, they have tri-pedal tanks, lasers ("heat rays"), they use chemical warfare, and they apparently even develop terrestrial flying machines (the first flight of the Wright brothers was yet 5 years in the future.)
The aliens are an impossibly strong and malevolent force that essentially guarantees humanity's destruction. There is no way to fight them.
The story is also a template, of sorts, for the eternal chase. The hero runs from hiding place to hiding place, has [often emotionally disturbing] encounters with other refugees along the way, and the baddies are always closing in. It's Children of Men and The Road and Cloverfield and even The Fugitive or Friday the 13th (2009), and so many more chase movies.
War never changes
Old books can be a strange experience. The pacing is often "wrong" for our modern sensibilities, the social customs of characters don't make sense to us, the writing style feels wrong. War of the Worlds isn't always immune to that, but it does often manage to cut through the surface tension of its own time period to speak directly to human instinct. As you read, you can't help but imagine yourself in a similar scenario. What would you do when a clear and present danger arrives at your doorstep? How do you protect the people you love? How do you find the people you love who have already been displaced? Do you try to fight? What do you do to survive? It doesn't matter whether this horror is happening to a bloke in the 19th century or to you in the 21st century, it's an emotional journey.
The hero of War of the Worlds is resoundingly NOT an action hero. He spends the book running for his life. He essentially sacrifices a stranger to avoid being caught himself. He makes some bad choices, but he also makes choices that allow him to survive. He never fights. He doesn't defeat the aliens in the third act, or at all.
The book will keep you on the edge of your seat. You should read it, and it's available for $0 from gutenberg.org and as an audiobook from Librivox.
