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''The War of the Worlds'' ( 1898 ), by H. G. Wells , is an early Science Fiction Novel (or Novella ) which describes an invasion of Earth by Alien s from Mars . PLOT SUMMARY The story is told by an unnamed narrator who witnesses a meteor landing on ". Other spacecraft land across the English countryside, and the invasion spreads. One of the tripods is destroyed in Shepperton by an Artillery battery, and two more are brought down in the Tillingham Bay by the Torpedo Ram HMS ''Thunder Child'' before the vessel is sunk, but soon all organized resistance has been beaten down and the Martians hold sway over much of southern England. The Narrator becomes trapped in a half-destroyed building overlooking the crater of one of the Martian landing sites and covertly witnesses the Martians close at hand, including their use of captured humans as a food supply. The Martians eventually abandon their encampment, and the Narrator travels into a deserted London where he discovers that the invaders have abruptly succumbed to terrestrial Disease s, to which they have no immunity. THE ALTERNATE ENDING The book contains a thoroughly worked-out alternative ending, presented through the vision of an artilleryman which the hero meets in his wanderings: The Martians would rule Earth for generations to come; most humans (especially the "soft" middle classes towards whom complete contempt is shown) would soon get used to being domestic animals; a nucleus of daring humans would hide out in tunnels and sewers, and would have approximately the same place in the Martian-dominated ecology as rats in the previous human one; but after the passage of generations, these defiant humans would learn to duplicate the Martian weapons and proceed to destroy the invaders. The vivid and detailed description suggests that Wells seriously considered using this ending. John Christopher 's acclaimed trilogy '' The Tripods '' is obviously an attempt to write in full this alternate ending. Many of the details are different - Christopher's invaders come from another solar system rather than Mars, and they do not use humans as food, but intend to eventually eliminate humanity altogether; still, Wells' basic scheme - a successful alien invasion, the conquerors striding over the Earth for many generations in huge tripedal machines, and a daring small band of humans hiding in caves and tunnels eventually defeating them against all odds - is faithfully followed by Christopher. Robert A. Heinlein took up the same theme, in a bit more humorous way, in his The Number Of The Beast where the heroes visit several different versions of Mars. One of them is the home planet of Martians who managed to hold on to the conquered Earth. The heroes encounter tribes of humans living in the Martian wilds, descendants of captive humans who had been transported to Mars by the conquerors and there managed to escape. Also on Mars, the wild humans still speak Cockney English - while the Martians' obedient slaves seem descended mainly from upper-class Englishmen. SEQUENCE OF EVENTS .]] Ten Martian landings are mentioned in the novel commencing just after midnight in June "early in the Twentieth Century ":
The duration of the war is three weeks:
SCIENTIFIC PREDICTIONS AND ACCURACY In 1898, Italian Astronomer s had observed natural features on Mars which were improperly translated into English as Canals . This fueled the belief that there was some sort of intelligent extraterrestrial life on the planet. Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant Space Gun , a common representation of space travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Military theorists in the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth had many speculations of building a "fighting machine" or "land Dreadnought " (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just prior to the first Wold War). Wells' concept of the Martian tripods, fast moving and equipped with heat rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end of these speculations, although Wells also presents less fantastic depiction of the Armored Fighting Vehicle in his short story The Land Ironclads . [http://www.toyraygun.com/exhibit1.html Not by chance, nothing which the humans possess upon land can in any way match these tripods, but when a Martian machine ventures into the sea it is defeated by a warship, the Martians having no experience with naval warfare on their planet of origin. On a different field , the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself - i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain which "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work. A further development of that idea, that the Martians have given up their stomachs and digestive tracts and instead they subsist by introducing the blood of other creatures into their veins, is sometimes criticised on biological grounds. However, given that the Martians possess an unknown physiology and highly advanced technology this criticism may not be well founded. Manly and Wade Wellamn, who wrote '' Sherlock Holmes' War Of The Worlds '' which describes the famous detective's adventures during the Martian occupation of London, turned the Martians into simple vampires, who suck and ingest human blood. INTERPRETATIONS H.G. Wells was a strong supporter of the theory of Evolution , and saw every Species as being engaged in a constant, and often brutal struggle for survival. In the book, the Martian/mankind conflict is portrayed as a similar struggle, but on a larger scale. The book explores the morality inherent in Social Darwinism , an ideology of some prominence at the time. The book has been viewed as an indictment of Europe an Colonial actions in Africa , Asia , Australasia , and the Americas . In the mindset of the time, European technological superiority was seen as evidence of all-round superiority, and thus Europeans were more qualified to administer colonized regions than their native inhabitants. The novel challenges this perspective by depicting the Martian invasion as unjust, regardless of the Martian technological superiority. Wells himself introduces this theme in the novel's first chapter: :"And before we judge them aliens too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians , in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"—''Chapter I'', "The Eve of the War." There is a small autobiographical element to the book: Wells seems to have taken great pleasure in the Fiction al devastation of locations where he had spent an unhappy Child hood. Animal Rights activist David McKnight, writing in the November 2004 issue of Human And Animal Rights , noted that at least five Vegetarians and animal rights activists known to him personally were substantially influenced to take their stance by reading Wells' book, which vividly conveys human beings' horror at becoming in effect the Martians' food animals. He surmises that many other people may have been similarly effected, though it might not have been Wells' intention to propagate vegetarianism. In many passages, an explicit comparison is drawn between the Martians' treatment of humans and the humans' own treatment of cows, rabbits, rats, ants and other creatures which mankind in one way or another treads underfoot. Many may argue that the book was a message directed to the public saying that the planet is not as safe as it seems. It may act as warning that at any point, something could happen resulting in the downfall of Earth. Indeed, while there had never been a "War of the Worlds" like the one described by Wells, the real World War which broke out two decades later did have much the psychological and cultural effect which Wells predicted, of shattering the complacency and self-assurance of Nineteenth Century Europe in general and Victorian Britain in particular. And the vivid description of the refugees fleeing London en masse was to be enacted in reality again and again during the cataclysmic wars of the Twentieth Century. UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
ADAPTATIONS ''The War of the Worlds'' has been adapted numerous times for radio, film, TV and video games.
INFLUENCES This theme of an Alien Invasion has remained popular ever since, some recent examples being '' Footfall '' by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle , the " Worldwar " series by Harry Turtledove , and the film '' Independence Day ''. Tim Burton 's farcical '' Mars Attacks! '' shares many themes with ''The War of the Worlds'', particularly the unexpected and inglorious demise of the Martian invaders. It can also be argued that the ''Matrix'' Trilogy had some influence from ''War of the Worlds'', especially in the way Morpheus explained to Neo how the Machines used humans trapped in the pods (with their minds imprisoned within the Matrix) to sustain themselves in the first film. Also, the Machine's overall superiority and ease in crushing human resistance, inspite of fanatical defence, can also be influences from H.G. Wells' novel. Like the Martians in ''War of the Worlds'', the Machines were only stopped by an unexpected circumstance when they were on the verge of annihilating Zion, by the peace which Neo bargained with the Machines in exchange for defeating the rogue Agent Smith in the Matrix. A number of people have written follow-up stories, often telling how the invasion went in places other than Britain. Two notable stories of this type are "Night of the Cooters" by Howard Waldrop , in which a Martian war machine lands in Texas, and "Foreign Devils" by Walter Jon Williams , set in China. ''War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches'', edited by Kevin J. Anderson , is an anthology of such stories (ISBN 0553103539). The idea of '' were roughly based on the idea of walking war machines. H.G. Wells' Martians may have also influenced the BattleTech and MechWarrior game series. Tripod like machines called Striders employed by the Combine from the computer game '' Half Life 2 '' along with other themes bear striking resemblance to those mentioned in the book. The Sentinels from the ''Matrix'' Trilogy are also machines with many tentacles, and are seen grabbing humans (though only to throw them to their deaths) during the siege of Zion as shown in '' The Matrix Revolutions ''. Eric Brown wrote a short story, "Ulla, Ulla," (2002) about an expedition to Mars, finding the truth behind H.G. Wells' novel. '' The Tripods '' is a sci-fi trilogy for young adults written between 1967 and 1968 by John Christopher . It depicts the Earth after it has been overcome by Alien s in three-legged machines. Humanity has been enslaved, and the books focus on the struggle by some teenagers to free the world of alien domination. Within six weeks of the novel's original 1897 magazine serialization, the '' New York Journal American '' began running a sequel, ''Edison's Conquest of Mars'' by Garrett P. Serviss, about an American counterattack against the Martians, spearheaded by Thomas Edison . The sequel debuted in the January 12 issue of the ''Journal American'' and ran until the February 10 issue. The sequel was published in book form in 1947 , and an abridged version appeared in 1954 in ''The Treasury of Science Fiction Classics''. In 1969 , Forrest J. Ackerman published an edited version, called ''Invasion of Mars''. In 2005 , Apogee Books published an unedited, unabridged version with the original magazine illustrations (ISBN 0-9738203-0-6). A French-Canadian author, Jean-Pierre Guillet, wrote a sequel to the book called "'' La Cage De Londres ''," ("The Cage of London"). After the aliens were defeated, they plotted revenge, and came back prepared to finally enslave humanity, and breed it for their bloody needs. The Cage of London is one of those breeding sites. In the comic version of '' The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen '', the invasion by the Martians is told from the perspective of The League, who are instructed to contact Doctor Moreau so that they can unleash H-142, a Biological Weapon that is a hybrid of Anthrax and Streptococcus upon the Martians. In the novel ''W. G. Grace's Last Case'' by Willie Rushton , W. G. Grace and Doctor Watson avert a second Martian invasion by attacking the Martian fleet on the far side of the moon with "bombs" containing influenza germs. In the 1970's, Marvel Comics had a character named Killraven ''Warrior of the Worlds'' who (in an alternate timeline) fought H. G. Wells' Martians after their second invasion of Earth. He first appeared in '' Amazing Adventures '' volume 2 #18. In 1975, Manly Wade Wellman and his son Wade Wellman published ''Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds'' in which Holmes, Dr. Watson , and Professor Challenger experience the events described in the original H.G. Wells novel. In 1978, Toshihiro Nishikado working at Taito designed the aliens for the popular Arcade Video Game '' Space Invaders '' based on the description of the octopus-like Martians from the original Wells novel, according to an October 2005 interview with the British gaming magazine '' The Edge ''. EXTERNAL LINKS
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