H.G. Wells’ masterpiece is 125 years old, but its Martian invaders have never felt more relevant.
The ending is the ultimate irony. The mighty Martian war machine is defeated by the smallest life form on Earth: bacteria. It’s a humbling reminder that we are not masters of nature. We are participants in it. The Martians lost because they didn’t do their “field research.” Sound familiar? (COVID-19 anyone?)
Or so they thought.
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The Martians leave a dying world (Mars is cooling and drying out) to conquer a living one. They are climate refugees with weapons. Today, we talk about climate migration, resource wars, and the tension between the developed and developing world. Wells’ Martians are what happens when one ecosystem collapses onto another. La guerra de los mundos
More Than a Radio Scare: Why The War of the Worlds Still Defines Science Fiction
The book’s second half is a masterclass in dread. The narrator hides in a collapsed house with a panicked curate (a priest) while a Martian collects human blood to drink. Finally, just as the last humans are cornered in the mountains, the Martians die. Not by a heroic last stand, but by the common cold. They have no immunity to Earth’s bacteria. The mighty Martian war machine is defeated by
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s…”