The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

[Vorchia]

I guess we should get this thing started and this book HAS been suggested and I just read it... I will find a copy of the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy asap. (No luck yet.)

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds however is so old that the copyrights are gone, making it publishable online! Its available online here: www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/b1c1.html so we can all access a copy very easily.
Why not discuss it now?

It was ok, I didn't read it in one go so I wasn't completely glued to the apper but it was a nice book and still readable. It was interesting. The copy I read had an afterword by Isaac Asimov which was very good too and helped explain things.

The book is written in way that would never happen right now, I mean, the aliens are slow, limbless creatures. Then the whole invasion of the world takes place slooooowly, one square kilometer of England at a time. Its very England centered, you'd expect to be more of a global invasion judging by the title.
The end was quite unexpected. I mean it makes no sense that any race can wipe out microbes because then nothing would ever decay and nutrients wouldn't go back into the ecosystem, you'd get in trouble sooner or later. Surely they could have wiped out dangerous microbes but there'd still be bacteria for rotting. There'd still be the potential for a pathogen, the knowledge of their variant of antibiotics would never get lost as long the ecosystem needs microbes?

Yes here she goes with the microbiology again.

But still it makes for an almost too easy a way of ending this alien invasion.

You never get to hear what the main character's wife goes through, she just shows up alive at the end of the story. It could have been an extra plotline...

I still like victorian novels! I dread to have to see what Spielberg did to it. I had a quick look at the site of the movie and it looks VERY different...

I'll edit this post tomorrow, I'm out of time. I just wanted to do this for the past three days or something but I keep shoving it ahead.

BDSP Vorchia

[Azonthus]

Oh goody.... A long book to read;) Hehe, I'll have to get a copy so I can read it on the bus!

[aric]

Ah, to heck with it. I'm never going to finish the book the way I've been going at it. I might as well post what I thought of the book from my previous readings. Also, the book club forum seems to be on life support.

vorchia said:

It was ok, I didn't read it in one go so I wasn't completely glued to the apper but it was a nice book and still readable. It was interesting. The copy I read had an afterword by Isaac Asimov which was very good too and helped explain things.

Okay? The quintessential alien invasion story by the father of science fiction is "okay"?

ZOMG!!!!!1111111oneoneoneoneoneshift

vorchia said:

The book is written in way that would never happen right now, I mean, the aliens are slow, limbless creatures.

Ah, but that's the point. You have these slow and laughably helpless creatures on their own. But then give them their machines and they are almost unstoppable. Their physical bodies have wilted to the point where almost everything but their brains are vestigial. Their machines have become the tools that give them agency ad power. Given some of the descriptions of Martian technology, those machines are almost like extensions of their bodies. In fact, since Martians are just gigantic brains, those machines are their bodies.

vorchia said:

Then the whole invasion of the world takes place slooooowly, one square kilometer of England at a time. Its very England centered, you'd expect to be more of a global invasion judging by the title.

Yeah. If the invasion happened like in Alabama, you'd have hillbillies shooting up the Martians with shotguns and Winchester rifles before they could get their machines to work.

"Git ahff mah Laynd!"

*BOOM*

;D

vorchia said:

The end was quite unexpected. I mean it makes no sense that any race can wipe out microbes because then nothing would ever decay and nutrients wouldn't go back into the ecosystem, you'd get in trouble sooner or later. Surely they could have wiped out dangerous microbes but there'd still be bacteria for rotting.

Yeah, that's one thing Wells boo-boo'ed on. Anyway, I suppose we could rationalize it by saying that even the ecological functions of their planet have been industrialized. It sort of makes sense since the planet is dying and the Martians would have needed to pull out every technological means to keep Mars running until they could invade Earth.

vorchia said:

There'd still be the potential for a pathogen, the knowledge of their variant of antibiotics would never get lost as long the ecosystem needs microbes?

I don't know if they forgot about it. The story really doesn't happen over a long period of time. The bacteria may have affected them too fast for them to have come up with an antidote.

vorchia said:

Yes here she goes with the microbiology again.

Wells would be proud.

vorchia said:

But still it makes for an almost too easy a way of ending this alien invasion.

Yeah, it's one of the more famous deus ex machina examples in literature. However, it is generally overlooked simply due to the brilliance of that plot device. After everything humans have tried to do in order to fight the Martians, they still got defeated very quickly. And what did bring down the Martians? Not the great Royal Navy, or the technological advancements of the day, but rather microbes. It wasn't divine intervention, either, despite that one little mention of God towards the end. Wells throughout the book depicts the universe as being amoral and mechanistic.

vorchia said:

You never get to hear what the main character's wife goes through, she just shows up alive at the end of the story. It could have been an extra plotline...

I think it would have been a bit of a distraction. There is a tangent with the Narrator's brother in London, but that was sort of necessary.

vorchia said:

I still like victorian novels! I dread to have to see what Spielberg did to it. I had a quick look at the site of the movie and it looks VERY different...

It looks different, but it's essentially the same. I like it a lot. I even put an avatar of the fighting machine in the avatar thread. The opening monologue and epilogue are essentially taken from the book. The motifs of Wells' book are mostly present in the movie. It doesn't quite go into the evolutionary aspects that Wells does, though. The aliens really don't lend themselves to that at all.

- Aric

[aric]

I thought this warranted its own post since it's a little more than off-tangent.

Here's an interesting excerpt.

" The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence . . . . The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour . . . . That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars."

Back in Wells' day, astronomers had the theory that the solar system was older the further out from the sun you went. Since Mars, according to this theory, is older, it is in a more advacned state of entropy compared to Earth. On the other hand, Earth now, was how Mars once was in the past. Venus is how Earth and Mars used to be at one point at their respective planetary histories. So, Venus represents an early stage of planetary development, Earth the middle, and Mars the later twilight of solar planets.

Intersting huh?

What's more interesting is what this means for the organisms living on these planets. From here, the Narrator speculates that the Martians may very well have been like us sometime in the distant past. Evolution and technological progress has brought Martians to their current octopus-like state. Here's the excerpt:

---------------------------------------------------

"It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or December, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, the Pall Mall Budget, and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called Punch. He pointed out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, 'teacher and agent of the brain.' While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.

"There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being."

--------------------------------------------------------

Now think about this. Martians used to be like us sometime in the past. What is Wells saying about how we'll be in the future? The development of planets are, according to the theory, very similar to each other. The environment of Mars partially led to how its inhabitants ended up. Since Earth will someday become like this, Wells is saying it will happen to us as well. The Martians are coldly callous in their attack on Earth, but Wells explains this is a result of the primal directive for survival. These aren't mustachio-twirling villains, but a race that needs to survive. Like-wise, humans will one day come upon a situation where they will find themselves in a position not unlike the Martians.

Of course, he already made the comparison several times before when he compares Martian actions to that of European ones undertaken in the name of Imperialism. But that's another post.

- Aric

[Vorchia]

Finally someone besides me posts, there's hope still! lol
Yes well, maybe thats a bad pick of words. To me 'okay' isn't a negative word or something, it means it isn't bad, its readable, enjoyable even but its not like I'm totally addicted.
Yes its obvious they need machines to do any physical task. They can just pick the most suitable body in the form of a machine for any task then all they have to do is drag their oversized heads to the machine. I wonder what they do when they have a power outage?
Another thing that struck me as odd was that the Martians brought only enough food to last their journey to earth. Upon arrival they almost immediately had to find food. What ARE the chances of finding suitable food on a different planet? It seems like an impossibly huge risk to take...

I think I read that narrative too.

[Barry]

Heck, I downloaded the whole radio show audio file
and burned it to a CD to listen to when I take a walk in the park. ;D

[GreySpectrum]

You got the whole radio show? That's pretty good finding that.

[Barry]

Yes, I got it from here.
www.mercurytheatre.info/

[GreySpectrum]

Coolies! ;D

[aric]

vorchia said:

Finally someone besides me posts, there's hope still! lol
Yes well, maybe thats a bad pick of words. To me 'okay' isn't a negative word or something, it means it isn't bad, its readable, enjoyable even but its not like I'm totally addicted.

Ah, quite understandable.

vorchia said:

Yes its obvious they need machines to do any physical task. They can just pick the most suitable body in the form of a machine for any task then all they have to do is drag their oversized heads to the machine. I wonder what they do when they have a power outage?

They probably call other Martians to help out.

ULLA ULLA ULLA ULLA ULLA ULLA!!!!!

vorchia said:

Another thing that struck me as odd was that the Martians brought only enough food to last their journey to earth. Upon arrival they almost immediately had to find food. What ARE the chances of finding suitable food on a different planet? It seems like an impossibly huge risk to take...

Well, they were observing Earth for quite a while. They could see that people were walking on it.

I wonder, though, what made them think that human blood was compatible with the Martian biological system?

- Aric

[Vorchia]

Thats what I wondered. I mean if they has somehow managed to send a ´earth explorer´ robot to the planet to check out the human cattle they´d also have found out about the mircobes of course... Besdeis humans SHOULDN´T even be good food to them. According to the book their foodsource on Mars are maybe humanoid in looks but they´re radically different chemically.
´´Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. ´´

Here, even the bones of these creatures are of a completely different composition then those of humans! The blood is probably just as radically different between the Martian humanoids and the humans. Human blood probably has no nutritional value to the Martians and might even be harmful. The human blood however could not have brought them infection as blood, per definition is sterile. Of course contamination and infection could happen from the human skin and or result from non sterile injectortubes used to suck out the blood. ) (On Mars they can´t poison themselves by not keeping the ´needle´ sterile as there are no microbes anymore, on Wells´s Mars...)

Oh yes, I also managed to finish THGTG... Yes I clearly have too much time on my hands, school will start soon.

[aric]

vorchia said:

Thats what I wondered. I mean if they has somehow managed to send a ´earth explorer´ robot to the planet to check out the human cattle they´d also have found out about the mircobes of course...

I think the Martians only used powerful telescopes. I don't think they sent probes there.

vorchia said:

Besdeis humans SHOULDN´T even be good food to them. According to the book their foodsource on Mars are maybe humanoid in looks but they´re radically different chemically.
´´Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. ´´

Here, even the bones of these creatures are of a completely different composition then those of humans! The blood is probably just as radically different between the Martian humanoids and the humans. Human blood probably has no nutritional value to the Martians and might even be harmful. The human blood however could not have brought them infection as blood, per definition is sterile. Of course contamination and infection could happen from the human skin and or result from non sterile injectortubes used to suck out the blood. ) (On Mars they can´t poison themselves by not keeping the ´needle´ sterile as there are no microbes anymore, on Wells´s Mars...)

Yeah. Oh well, it was still pretty horrific. In the Spielberg movie, the Martians use humans to fertilize the soil. They're either stuck with a gigantic syringe and sucked dry, and/or they're ground up into mush and sprayed over the land. Really awesome.

vorchia said:

Oh yes, I also managed to finish THGTG... Yes I clearly have too much time on my hands, school will start soon.

Meh. I didn't find THGTTG all that engaging. I might not participate in that one at all. Besides, school just started for me and I have to concentrate on writing my Master's thesis.

- Aric

[Vorchia]

Well the reason I STARTED with HHGTG is because everyone seemed to want it, it was by popular vote remember? I had enough trouble getting the book and then wrestling through over 800 pages of decreasing quality only to find out I'm the only one DOING it, yaaay. Not. Oh well, at least thats one more literary favourite off the list.
I'm starting on Monday, I already have homework too, there's now less time to read.
I'll watch the movies when they hit TV. I rarely if ever pay to see a movie. In fact I only do so if I can go with friends but I don't have any irl so that settles it.

Hmm, human fertiliser, do I even WANT the visualisation of that??? lol

[Buttercup]

Ok, I am really into sci-fi and fantasy and all of that and I REALLY, REALLY tried to get into the book over the past week, (I cheated and listened to it on audio CD while crocheting and i just could not get into the storyline. Maybe i have been brainwashed by all of the action and adventure stories or Well's writing style is just too different for me but I gave up and couldn't even finish it from sheer boredom. I am sorry to say that I expected more and not because I had seen the new movie but because I had always been led to beleive that the book was a really engaging read.

I was dissappointed!

The plot just moved too slow and i think that Well's suffered from a superiority complex when he wrote it. He does make it absolutely obvious that the characters in is book were of the mind that Martians would be almost stupid and that he thought that this was a misconception, but then he goes on to write the book with taht mindset anyway?! Not my style! Admittedly, i only made it halfway through the book, but it seems like i didn't miss much. I may be wrong but I was too bored by the writing style to care. Sorry if that offends any die hard Wells fans. ;D

[Vorchia]

Well I had a bit of trouble getting through it too. Movies always tend to be more adapted to the popular taste of the moment anyway.
I'm not offended by your opinion! Well's 'The Time Machine' is better reading!