Book Review: The War of the Worlds

(Edit -- this review is kinda messy and all over the place -- whenever I feel strongly about something I get kind of gushy and sloppy over it. I kinda want to take the part where I'm comparing it to Day of the Triffids and The Road and turn it into a separate essay)

War of the Worlds is one of those books that I never got around to reading because I always forgot that I hadn't done so already. HG Wells is one of those guys, like Lovecraft or Tolkien, that became a victim of his own popularity, and was mimicked so many times that it's sometimes easy to forget that they were actually the progenitors of what they were doing, and weren't relying on a bunch of pre-established tropes and cliches.

Skimming through some more recent reviews of War of the Worlds, I feel like it's fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last few years. It gets shit flung at it from all angles -- the sci-fi people hate it because it doesn't really explain anything scientific, the adventure story people hate it because it lacks a strong clear villain and is too classic-y, classics people hate it because it's too adventure-y, and the alien people hate it because they think it paints aliens as one-dimensional aggressors (lots of new agey people actually revile the book because they blame it as the sole reason why so many are inclined to assume that beings from another planet would be malevolent).

The plot of the book, also recently maligned, is well known at this point -- Martians land in England, and being to systematically destroy everything. People also seem to think it fails as a disaster story because not enough stuff actually burns down.

As always, I think people need to calm the fuck down, because they're missing the point. War of the Worlds was written in England and published in 1858 while the Empire was still going strong, and a large part of why the novel was so effectively terrifying and well received was because it showed how fragile and fallible all that shit could be. Novels and movies about a societal collapse are pretty common today, and I think it's important to remember how scary and powerful a well written book about that would have been if it hadn't been experienced before.

While the book may fail today in terms of shock and surprise, it succeeds wildly in two areas: how much STUFF it has to say, and how well it says it. Unlike a lot of other alien/adventure stories, which get by on an exciting plot that keeps you rushing through and turning pages, War of the Worlds takes its time with language and has some truly (surprisingly) beautiful moments of writing. At one point in the story, after all the shit hits the fan, the narrator ends up having to kill somebody. Later on, when reflecting on it, he says --

The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall’ I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of cooperation -- grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses -- all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will....

Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place -- a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity -- pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

I'm sorry, but to me that's powerful shit that doesn't deserve to be shoved into the abysmal "genre fiction" dungeon.

Understandably, people often compare War of the Worlds with Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars series, but I think they have almost nothing in common except for having Martians as central figures. War of the Worlds actually has a lot more in common with John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, which would come half a century later, and would also become much disparaged and relegated to pulp-status, mainly because of the terrible movie with the same title. Not only did War of the Worlds almost (arguably) create the sci-fi genre, but it -- more successfully -- created the post-disaster genre. It would take 50 years for The Day of the Triffids to match it, and I don't think another novel has come close until 2006, when The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published. All three of these novels have been criticized for not having a strong, clear antagonist, because all three of these novels have -- I think possibly more so than Dostoevsky, though that might get me lynched -- shown that the specific nature of disaster is secondary in interest to how humanity as a group and people as individuals deal with it. Chances are that anyone with enough leisure time to sit down and read a book haven't been pushed to the extreme limits of where tragedy can push them, and hasn't had their strength tested or seen what they are or aren't capable of. The fact that something that seems almost arbitrary can cause the light we're reading by to go out and for our entire set of societal assumptions to collapse and leave us to fend for ourselves is, I think, even more of an effective means of terrifying a reader today than it was a century ago, since we're (generally) even more clueless and helpless about how to meet our basic needs than we were back then.

Wells makes repeated references to ants throughout the novel, and how often the narrator was reminded of the way they look to us compared to how we looked to the Martians. The other great message of War of the Worlds is to constantly remind us of the danger of our arrogance, a point driven home when the Martians themselves meet their own anticlimactic demise.

I'm hoping that at some point the general consensus on this book swings back in the other direction, because I think every single inch of its status as a classic is well deserved and I think it's probably one of the most important books ever written. Stupid movies and copycat books aside, War of the Worlds is one of those very, very, very few things that makes me proud to be human, even if it does so by reminding me of how pitiful and small and irrelevant we all are.

Rating: B+
Recommended For: Sci-fi and Alien fans, fans of disaster fiction, fans of human misery.