WAR OF THE WORLDS

H G Wells’ famous novel about the million-to-one-chance Martian invasion of Earth.

Rightfully feted as the father of Science Fiction, H G Wells has, in recent years, seen a marked decline in his popularity – not even making an entry in Channel 4’s recent Top 100 Novels. This is a marked injustice for someone who wrote not one, but several of the English language’s most famous novels – and the most famous of those surely is War of the Worlds.

Everybody knows the story - if only from the Jeff Wayne concept album. Martians, with intellect immeasurably superior to our own, land on Horsell Common near Woking and then begin the systematic subjugation of the human race only to be defeated, not by any artifice of Man, but by the simple tenacity of the lowly bacterium.

Wells’ presents humanity a challenge, in the form of the Martians, and poses the question, what would happen to humanity if Mankind, for all its technical ability and supremacy (at least for 1898) was faced with something with which it could not compete? The simple answer, he believes, is a sudden – almost cataclysmic – collapse of modern human society. This is a very black novel, as Wells has southern England change from a bustling modern metropolis to a wasteland, its population change from an urbanised society to a mere collection stragglers and lone survivors.

His intent is, in my opinion, to show a veiled warning to Mankind. And that is that civilisation, despite several thousand years of history, will always be precarious and that society, despite (or maybe even because of) its achievements, is still only a few weeks away from barbarism.