The War of the Worlds
May. 31st, 2009 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI'm quite sure that I read The War of the Worlds in my early teens, but I remembered very little actual detail. (So little, in fact, that on my list of this year's reading, I'm not classing WotW as a re-read.) I do know that, at the time, I had no idea what a "curate" was; I believe I interpreted it as meaning something like "curator".
Anyway, I only have a few tangential comments to make. I knew about Wells' astronomy, with its slowly-cooling Sun and inward-migrating habitable zone; before the discovery of nuclear fusion, what other picture was possible? That the Martians used cannon for interplanetary transit also was unsurprising; the potential of rocketry had not yet been recognized. The biology of the Martians raised my eyebrows a little; it's odd how teleological a view of evolution so many early SF writers adopted. Creatures reduced to little more than brain, speaking tympanum, heart and lungs, without even a digestive system or, of course, sex... That the Martians were defeated by succumbing to Earthly micro-organisms I had known; that, according to Wells, the Martian ecosystem had no micro-organisms at all, I had not. I can't blame Wells for his ignorance, but still, that last makes me shake my head.
The other main point is this. It's pretty obvious that WotW is "really" about colonialism and imperialism, just as The Time Machine is "really" about class conflict. My copy has an afterword by Isaac Asimov, which goes over this point in some detail, and there's something about that afterword that annoys me. Asimov writes
I think that Asimov allowed the analogy to carry him away, here. Certainly the weakening of the European powers by the wars was a major factor, but is it fair to deny all causal agency to Gandhi, Nehru, and Chandra Bose? To Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap? (No successful action?) Sukarno, Ben Bella, Kenyatta, Senghor, Mugabe, Mandela, Lumumba: were their efforts absolutely without effect? Nonsense. It is possible that the withdrawals would have taken place without any action at all by the locals, but the long and savage wars in Indochina and the shorter, but equally savage, one in Algeria suggest otherwise, not to mention events in Indonesia, in Kenya, in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Asimov's analysis is uncharacteristically short-sighted here, I think.
Anyway, I only have a few tangential comments to make. I knew about Wells' astronomy, with its slowly-cooling Sun and inward-migrating habitable zone; before the discovery of nuclear fusion, what other picture was possible? That the Martians used cannon for interplanetary transit also was unsurprising; the potential of rocketry had not yet been recognized. The biology of the Martians raised my eyebrows a little; it's odd how teleological a view of evolution so many early SF writers adopted. Creatures reduced to little more than brain, speaking tympanum, heart and lungs, without even a digestive system or, of course, sex... That the Martians were defeated by succumbing to Earthly micro-organisms I had known; that, according to Wells, the Martian ecosystem had no micro-organisms at all, I had not. I can't blame Wells for his ignorance, but still, that last makes me shake my head.
The other main point is this. It's pretty obvious that WotW is "really" about colonialism and imperialism, just as The Time Machine is "really" about class conflict. My copy has an afterword by Isaac Asimov, which goes over this point in some detail, and there's something about that afterword that annoys me. Asimov writes
In the book, of course, the Martians are finally defeated, but not through any successful action of human beings. H. G. Wells died in 1946, too soon to see that European imperialism would finally be stopped also, but not through any successful action of the non-Europeans.He goes on to attribute decolonization primarily to the effects of the World Wars on Europe.
I think that Asimov allowed the analogy to carry him away, here. Certainly the weakening of the European powers by the wars was a major factor, but is it fair to deny all causal agency to Gandhi, Nehru, and Chandra Bose? To Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap? (No successful action?) Sukarno, Ben Bella, Kenyatta, Senghor, Mugabe, Mandela, Lumumba: were their efforts absolutely without effect? Nonsense. It is possible that the withdrawals would have taken place without any action at all by the locals, but the long and savage wars in Indochina and the shorter, but equally savage, one in Algeria suggest otherwise, not to mention events in Indonesia, in Kenya, in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Asimov's analysis is uncharacteristically short-sighted here, I think.
