A peace delegation of humans tries to make contact but they're ruthlessly scorched to death by Martian heat-ray weapons. The creatures are unable to breathe Earth's air and swiftly return to their vehicle. Some days later, the narrator who is on a walk on the Surrey Downs notices a weird cylindrical vehicle that suddenly opens to release a horde of hideous creatures who are later discovered to be Martians.
The story begins in an observatory in Ottershaw, when scientists note a series of mysterious explosions taking place on Mars. It was in fact the first book to present the idea of conflict between inhabitants of different planets.
One of the first observations the journalist narrator makes on encountering the creature that has emerged from the alien cylinder in, er, Surrey, is to note rather starchily "the absence of a chin".Extraterrestrial invasion, the earth taken over by omniscient intelligences from Mars, the whole of humanity under siege and a nameless narrator who seems to be the lone survivor of the complete devastation of human civilization – scenes from a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster? Far from it! The War of the Worlds by HG Wells was written more than a century ago and went on to become an iconic work in the science fiction genre, spawning a whole new genre of literature featuring alien invaders. Even the language, at times, is remarkably matter of fact. There is no pulsating final battle, in which a winner is garlanded with the spoils of victory, because the defeated species falls via much more prosaic means. Perhaps that's because there's no hero character a la Dan Dare or Buck Rogers to grab the attention in Wells's battle of civilisations – barely anyone, indeed, has a name.
I t's a quirk of literary history that HG Wells's genre-defining tale of Martian invasion is probably more famous for its adaptations – the Orson Welles radio play that supposedly tricked America into believing they were genuinely under attack from Martians, the films, television series, even Jeff Wayne's double album and live tour – than the groundbreaking original, first published in serial format in Pearson's Magazine in 1897.
0 kommentar(er)
