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The War of the Worlds

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Nearly fifty years ago the Looking Glass Library published an edition of HG Wells's WAR OF THE WORLDS with some very creepy black and white illustrations by Edward Gorey; for the first time, this edition has been re-issued by NYRB. It's hard to think of another artist who could have extracted the same bleak sense of horror out of Wells's 1898 novel as Gorey did: he beautifully captures the Martians's loathesomeness and their cruelty. Wells's novel always deserves another look--it is much more horrific than people tend to remember: his Martians casually fish for the humans in their giant tripod machines so as to suck their blood from them later. Its Anglocentric vision (the Martians only land around London, which for Wells is basically the whole of the world) shows the egocentrism of the most powerful nation on Earth at the Victorian fin de siecle, and the odd speech the man from Putney Hill makes to the novel's narrator late in the book exactly captures exactly what Wells believed might have to be done to combat the lassitude and decadence his overextended empire suffered from.

This is an edition to savor as Gorey's black and white illustrations really add to the creepiness and horror of the Martian invasion as only Gorey's illustrations could do.

As Gorey points out in the intro, at the dawn of the 20th century, no one would have believed in an alien invasion of earth by a superior intelligence. So one thing that distinguishes the novel is Wells's ability to decribe a realistic human response to an unrealistic event.

Some of that complacency is evident right from the start in the novel, as the humans are at first relunctant to admit the full extent of the danger, believing the authorities and the military have taken the necessary precautions and can contain any serious threats. This is despite the fact that several dozen people get incinerated by the heat ray in the initial attempt to communicate with the Martians.

Then there is a creeping sense of dread at the fragmentary but disturbing news from the front, but still the humans don't fully comprehend or are willing to accept the situation. When they finally do, an all out panic ensues, the chaos, desperation, hopelessness, and enormity of which Wells spends much of the novel describing as town after town is abandoned as the Martians advance, and the countryside is filled with literally millions of starving, thirsty, exhausted, and injured people. Many people are killed in the panic and stampede, rather than by the Martians. As Wells says, it is the rout of civilization and the massacre of the human race.

I had a few comments about the tripods and their weapons. In the book, the tripods have a heat ray with a rotating parabolic reflector to aim the beam, which is invisible since it is made up of heat waves. The second weapon is a missile containing a thick, heavy, oily, and poisonous black smoke and gas which hugs the ground and seeps into every nook and cranny, suffocating and poisoning anything that breathes it. The combination of the two weapons makes the tripods unbeatable and nothing can stop their deliberate and measured advance. The movies' versions are different obviously, but this is how it was in the original book.

There is also very little actual description of the tripods, except that they are described as being about 100 feet tall, cylindrical in shape with a rotating cowl on top, presumably for aiming the heat ray. I don't recall the color, but the metal cylinders they arrive in are a strange whitish- yellow color. Here Wells does something interesting as he says the metal gives off four lines in the blue region of the spectrum, indicating that he was familiar with the science of mass spectometry, something most people would never have heard of.

Also, contrary to the movie portrayals, there is only one Martian per tripod. Wells's view of the Martians is that they are mainly brains with vestigial bodies who occupy whatever machines they need to do their work.

Some of the astronomy is obsolete but necessary for the plot; for example, the Martians have come here because their planet condensed before the earth from the original primordial nebula and Mars is therefore much older than the earth and is cooling and dying a slow death. But this isn't really true.

One minor quip about the novel. One odd thing about Wells's account is that he is very fond of smoke and dust. There is dust and smoke everywhere, including green smoke, black smoke, and a ubiquitous fine, gray dust. London and its environs, it seems, are sort of like a Hoover vacuum bag turned inside-out. However, most of the time, one never sees the Martian tripods responsible for all of this smoke, except for one scene where the smoke carrying rockets are described. However, this is interesting in that Wells's description prefigures the phosgene gas weapons and attacks of WWI 17 years later.

Also, he often speaks of artillery guns and batteries going off in the distance although one rarely gets to see them in action. Usually Wells just says they could be heard (and there was also smoke visible), but that's it.

On a more positive note, his account of the Torpedo Ram boat, which brings down two of the Martian tripods that were wading in the harbor, is probably the most dramatic and interesting battle scene in the entire book. My sense is that Wells, being a former teacher, isn't that comfortable describing military actions and strategy and so the novel glosses over much of that.

Another curious aspect of the novel is if I remember right, one never learns the name of the narrator of the story or of his medical student brother. But it seems clear that the writer, who admits to being "speculative philosopher" and writer on morals, is Wells himself.

One final comment about the book. Although it's only about 200 pages long, few novels in the history of science fiction portray such a dire, dismal, hopeless, and pretty much depressing story throughout the entire novel as War of the Worlds does. In many ways, the sci-fi genre was a literature of optimism as it was still felt in the early years of the 20th century that science could solve all social problems and the future for humans and for society was bright. Wells's novel is almost unique in pointing out the risks of science and that the universe might be a bigger, more dangerous place than we had thought. Written at the end of the Gay Nineties, Wells's novel sounds an uncharacteristically cautious and sober note about mankind's possible future.

But despite the overall downer theme and message, it's still one of the greatest classics of science fiction, and as the archetypal alien invasion novel it has probably never been surpassed.

"War of the Worlds", the grand-daddy of all alien invasion novels - and easily the most famous - has endured for many reasons, among which is its ability to reflect the anxieties present in successive ages since it was written. Currently, and not surprisingly perhaps, it carries a very post-9/11 feel. This is a story of gradually mounting terror and the panic that ensues, triggered by an incident whose momentous import is unappreciated initially. The world changes and the previous age's complacency can never be retrieved.

Wells's ability to capture a believable human response to an unbelievable occurence is what keeps the story grounded and genuinely frightening. This edition, illustrated by one of the great masters of the mischieviously macabre, is one to savour in these unsettling times.

Edward Gorey's line drawings always feel like they're a hundred years old, and H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds first appeared 108 years ago. Both stir the same nostalgic senses. New York Review Books Classics celebrates their union in a 2005 release of 'Edward Gorey's' The War of the Worlds, first published in 1960. Gorey's 29 text illustrations, unremarkable on first glance - that is compared to The Doubtful Guest (1957) or The Object Lesson (1958), or even to Warwick Goble's illustrations in the serialized first appearance in Pearson's magazine in 1897 - do end up working very well when digested together. And together, the vivid first-person narrative and drawings creep out the shadows into the imagination. Gorey's gloomy, somber silhouettes serve as backdrops for the swirling confusion the narrator encounters in every chapter.

The catastrophe unfolds through the eyes of this faceless man, the weight of his horror carried to the end, and the drawings carry the same weight. Only the Martians and their gangly machines are illuminated, and the cover illustration presents them in all their menacing glory. The wraparound illustrations on the boards alone is worth its' having, though a dust jacket would've made it extra special.

When Looking Glass Library (Gorey was art director and a co-founder) published War of the Worlds in 1960, many probably recalled an event just eleven years earlier. Riots in Quito, Ecuador resulted in 20 deaths, in response to a radio broadcast of a localized version of The War of the Worlds in 1949. And eleven years before that, there was New Jersey, Halloween night, and Orson Welles on the air waves. The War of the Worlds moves mysteriously between two worlds. Not between Mars and Earth. Between fiction and non-fiction. Impelling entertainment or mass hysteria. It's all in how it's delivered. The War of the Worlds can be vitriolic stuff.

The "War of the Worlds" published by New York Review of Books is simply H. G. Wells' novel. But about 50 years ago I purchased Edward Gorey's illustrated "War of the Worlds" and along with the "Classics Illustrated" images the images of Gorey's edition burned in to my mind what War of the Worlds should look like.
I praise the New York Review of Books for re-publishing this wonderful copy of Wells' novel because if you are going to read Wells' book (and the summer of 2005 is a good time to do it) this is the copy to get and hold and pass down to your kids.
I still have my 1950's Edward Gorey copy of "War of the Worlds" but just like his Haunted Looking Glass (also re-published by New York Review of Books)my 1950's copies are now so brittle that I do not dare to open them. So now we can have new copies to move us along for 50 more years.
Get yourself a Edward Gorey illustrated copy of "War of the Worlds" and see that it makes a enjoyable book even more fun.

Basically, it is a good, fast moving story. It keeps you glued to your chair both by its plot, but also by its writing. This is not fast food writing. This is not the kind of writing that you consume like french fries, enjoy and forget instantly. The prose is beautiful, every word seemingly chosen with care to build up a scene or create a mood. The quote that began this review is one example. Here is another to describe the collapse of the government and the end of law and order, "All organizations were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body."

Right from the start, the reader is given a growing sense of danger, dread and horror. The narrator (who seems to be Wells, himself) describes the ancient, doomed civilization of Mars. It is doomed because Mars itself is a dying planet and the Martians must look elsewhere if they are to survive. They look to the earth and they have a technology so advanced and a moral sense so non-existent, that people do not exist for them except as a nuisance to be gotten rid of.

Having given the reader that background information, Wells describes the landing of a mysterious object near the small English town where he is living happily with his wife. The object is regarded at first as a meteorite, then as a curiosity and then as an enigma as it slowly opens. No one sees it as dangerous until it lashes out with a deadly heat ray, killing people. (Clearly Wells anticipated the invention of the laser!) When these first deaths occur, the narrator hastily sends his wife to stay with relatives a few miles away, not anticipating any real danger, but just being sensibly cautious. He himself quite matter of factly returns home and is suddenly plunged into the midst of chaos and danger. The Martians are on the move. More and more of the strange objects are landing. The Martians ignore all efforts to communicate and contemptuously destroy all human efforts at attack or defense. The Martians begin a sweep of the countryside, slaughtering everyone in their path.

So everyone expects that the moment the British army goes into action against the Martians, the Martians will be doomed. Instead, the Martians simply annihilate the British army. The highest technology known to man is slapped aside like the stinging of mosquitoes. That is all man is to the invader, a pesky insect. Or, as a soldier who is the sole survivor of his unit tells the narrator, their best efforts were: "It's bows and arrows against the lightning." I doubt that we, reading it today, can fully grasp how shocking that must have sounded to the average Victorian reader.

That was Well's intention -- to shock the reader. It's no accident that he used the simile of bows and arrows against the lightning. Great Britain (along with the other Western powers) had been able to conquer "savages" around the world because the British had the lightning (guns) and the "savages" had only bows and arrows. Out of those victories came a sense of moral superiority the concept that Western civilization was superior instead of admitting that it was only Western technology that was momentarily superior. Wells was a writer on social issues and he used science fiction to show what would happen if the British Empire came up against aliens who were as far beyond them as they were beyond the "savages" they had conquered and who treated them as they did the "savages." In War of the Worlds, it is made very clear that the Martians really don't behave any worse towards humans than humans behave towards each other. In fact, he comments early in his story, "Before we judge of them (the Martians) too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought...Are we such Apostles of Mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

Wells wanted his readers to think and feel what it means to be a conquered people who are conquered and destroyed not through lack of courage or effort but simply because the enemy's technology is superior. I have no idea how many readers of the day understood the message and learned humility from it. War of the Worlds began that popular part of science fiction that imagines invasions from outer space, the most recent being the blockbuster Independence Day. Here the message is, unfortunately, that even though alien technology is superior, humans are able to cleverly find a way to defeat the enemy. That makes for a good, exciting story, but it is not the message Wells was giving.

War of the Worlds does have a happy ending. The aliens are defeated, but not by the cleverness and resourcefulness of man. Something else defeats them and saves the human race. The message of War of the Worlds then is as timely today as it was in 1898. Man is not the master of the earth, much less the universe. Man needs to learn to walk humbly upon the earth and value what he has before it all is lost.

A metallic jellyfish flails across the green meadow, flinging its appendages every which way against the purple sky. Further on, similar creatures have already wreaked havoc upon the landscape and its inhabitants. Scores of small fires encircle everyone and everything in the foreground as the giant menacing marauder looms overhead. Wispy cirrus clouds, a flimsy gathering of pines and a minuscle moon all recede into the background as terror is unleased upon all in the vistors' path.

Bold orange text announces the grounding of forms, THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by H.G. WELLS, and furthermore, Illustrated by EDWARD GOREY. Even the bar code is blocked out in fiery tones. Before you even open the beautiful NYRB reissue of this classic of suspense and terror, an indelible mark is made. The Martian creatures are inscribed upon your subconscious. At the beginning of each of the two books and twenty-seven chapters included therein, Gorey supplements the text with an exquisite pen and ink drawing, a troubling indicator of the action that follows.

This confluence of forms is a victory for all involved; Wells, Gorey, Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, and most of all, the reader or soon-to-be viewer. With the imminent release of one of the summer's most anticipated films, I can find no better prelude into the swelling hysteria that is The War of the Worlds than this elegantly-illustrated volume .

I recently read this and I was surprised to find out how fresh this story is. Despite being over 100 years old, this novel still packs a punch. In fact, I found that I like the novel version much better than the movies. The Martians seem somewhat more terrifying through the eyes of the 18th century, while at the same time seeming more realistic. For example, in the novel, the Martians are a little careless in the begining, and one of them is killed by a lucky artillary shot. However in more recent versions, the aliens are even impervious to nuclear attack. This takes the science of the Martians from advanced to super or almost magical. The novel does a much better job I think. H. G. Wells proves that science fiction doesn't have to be ephemeral--it can last despite the advances in science.

What better way to launch into this modern adventure classic than with the aid and comfort of thirty Edward Gorey illustrations (including a sensational wrap-around full color cover)? I wanted to read this before the Steven Spielberg film opens at the end of June. This is the book that caused such a sensation when Orson Wells made a realistic radio broadcast of the story and scared the hell out of everyone who heard it. Its still a great read and Gorey turns it into something close to a graphic novel with his great illustrations. This New York Review Book edition gets my highest recommendation.

Unknown to the inhabitants of Earth, the planet Mars is aging and nearing its exhaustion. The Martians, not even perceiving humans to be anything other than animals, decide that it is time to seize this lush, young planet. Landing in several locations in southeastern England they begin their conquest of the planet. Can man, with his most advanced technology hope to stop the Martians with their much more advanced technology?

You've seen the 1953 movie, War of the Worlds, and want to read it in book form? Well, then don't look here. Herbert George Wells wrote this book in 1898, a mere one year after The Invisible Man, and two years after The Island of Doctor Moreau. The moviemakers of the 1950s made a wonderful movie, but one that, alas, bears very little resemblance to the original!

This book is one of the crowning examples of nineteenth century fantastic fiction. It is a gripping story that masterfully combines horror and suspense, keeping you at the edge of your seat until the final page.