Guide to the Classics: The War of the Worlds – Gizmodo Australia

Spoiler alert: this story details how The War of the Worlds ends.
The latest screen adaption of H. G. Wells 1898 modern masterwork The War of the Worlds will hit our screens this week. Continuously in print since its first publication, the book is a literary gift that keeps on giving for producers and screenwriters. They recognise the storys unerring capacity to find its mark with each generation.
Wells who also wrote The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) helped pioneer the science fiction genre when he conceived this astonishing book. With an eyewitness narration that reads grippingly still, it tells of a Martian invasion of Earth.
Shock and awe
Set in London, Wells depicts a complacent world; of men serene in their assurance of their dominion over the planet. But humans get the shock of another reality when suddenly visited upon by blood-feeding and squid-like creatures possessed of intellects vast and cool that are unsympathetic to Earthlings whose planet they had long regarded with envious eyes.
An advance party arrives inside metal cylinders shot from giant cannons stationed on Mars. From the cylinders come dozens of Martians, each operating a three-legged metal fighting-machine that attacks Londons helpless population by means of a heat ray. From these whatever is combustible flashes into flame, metal liquifies, glass melts and water explodes into steam.
Fleeing like rats from a burning ship, panic spreads like a contagion. The narrator describes a breakdown of law and order, and undergoes something of a breakdown himself.
Upper-class women arm themselves as they cross the country, because traditional deference has gone up in smoke. The social body of organisation police, army, government suffers swift liquefaction.
The Martians, however, had become too intelligent for their own good. They had made the Red Planet disease-free but forgotten about germ theory. And so while laying waste to London, they inhale a bug; a simple bacteria against which their systems were unprepared and so suffered a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be.
London will rise again. The world has been spared. Humanity gets lucky this time.
A wider war
In the new Anglo-French television series, La Guerre Des Mondes, the action takes place in both London and France. Martian devastation is given wider latitude.
Why does this now-familiar story have such a hold on successive generations? Iterations include the Orson Welles radio broadcast of fake news bulletins about Martian invasion, to the 1978 contemporary music version with Richard Burton narration, to Steven Spielbergs film blockbuster starring Tom Cruise. Last year also saw a BBC production set in Edwardian London.
One response is to consider our attraction to sci-fi. It sees the laws of science upended. Technology seems to make anything possible and to minds already accustomed to real technological transformation, sci-fi literature brings the now-thinkable future into the present.
But therere less obvious elements to think about: themes that were important in 1898 and resonate still.
Invasion and imperialism
Wells book touched something existentially British during their Pax Britannica period of relative peace. Across the Channel, Europe seethed with diplomatic intrigue and tensions culminating in the first world war.
The new sci-fi genre connected to an older invasion literature genre; a long-standing British apprehension of the Continent, especially its renascent German threat. Wells hints at this when he writes that the arrival of the cylinders (before the Martians emerged from them) did not

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