Headscratchers / The War of the Worlds (1898)

• How idiotic must Earth's scientific community have been, if some kept arguing that the flashes on Mars were a natural phenomenon even after the third or fourth such event? The Martians were launching their capsules every 24 hours on the dot! No natural phenomenon would be that perfectly-timed.
  • Old Reliable Geysers, anyone?
  • There was actually a bit of "truth in television" involved with those flashes: Wells was drawing on reports at the time of "Martian Flares" which some observers believed might be attempts by Martians to communicate with Earth using giant mirrors, but cooler heads of science dismissed as the natural phenomena of light reflecting off Martian clouds and glaciers.
• Are we supposed to assume the aliens have no doctors or any kind of treatment? I know its in the original novel that germs kill them, but H.G. Wells wrote it at a time when antibiotics let alone effective treatments and isolation were not known. Medical science was not really advanced at the time so Wells could not assume a future where invading armies were free of this risk. An invading army from space would have access to stuff we cannot yet conceive yet they fail to take basic precautions in an alien environment for them.
  • Multiple sources from the musical adaptation of the original novel state that the aliens had wiped out any form of disease on their planet, and thus eliminated the need for medical science (at least the kind that treated infections or diseases). So they just didn't think to prepare, or their immunity was that low after centuries of not facing infections at all that they were all terminal before they could get anyone to research a cure.
  • The book also mentions that the aliens wiped out all disease and germs on Mars, leaving them vulnerable to Earth's microbes. Further, they feed by injecting human blood directly into their veins, which would be a major infection source if anything (blood transfusion was not well understood back then).
  • The Doylist answer is that the book is an allegory about British colonialism and imperialism at the time, and that the invaders so outmatched the defenders technologically (as the British frequently did) that they were Nigh-Invulnerable to military assault, but that each new world (or part of ours) has its own unique diseases and afflictions which can destroy a force attempting to conquer it (or destroy the people you're trying to conquer). Basically, Welles was saying "Yeah, smallpox is only fun when it's not happening to you." The Watsonian explanation could very well be that Martian medical science was indeed so advanced that paradoxically they were completely unprepared for any significant infections, or that the Earth diseases were so virulent to Martian physiology that there was just no chance of finding a cure before they all dropped dead. If they didn't even realize they were sick until they became symptomatic, and died very shortly after showing symptoms, no one in the Martian command structure would have had any idea what was going on, let alone what to do about it, until it was too late.
  • The first season of the 1988 television series (an unofficial sequel to the film) works on the premise that the "Martian" doctors and scientists did realize, too late for the original invasion, that Earth microorganisms are deadly to them, and as a result the surviving aliens tend to be forced to nuke themselves with bacteria-destroying radiation to survive and carry out their next invasion, which provides a couple useful plot devices for the series.
  • This is arguably a case of Fridge Brilliance: if a civilization has entirely wiped out disease and all illness, what's the point of having doctors? They may still have microbiologists, but they'd be serving in pure science roles with none of the medical applications seen today. That infection is even a thing could be limited to microbiologists, but they wouldn't necessarily put together that they can get sick until they look over and see that Gulgulthrapp is flopping out of the hood of his Fighting Machine with a really nasty wheezing cough. That would be the first "oh crap" moment; the second would be recognizing that everyone's been mainlining a major vector for Terrestrial pathogens for weeks now and so everyone is infected. They'd have very little time to reinvent doctoring from the ground up once that realization is made.
  • The book doesn't say they wiped out diseases on their planet, that's from the adaptations. The book flat-out says that micro-organisms simply don't exist on Mars at all. This is absolutely ludicrous from a modern scientific viewpoint, of course, but it made sense to Wells at the time. Thus the martians are wiped out by something they don't even know exists, not something they foolishly forgot to account for.
  • Actually, the book does suggest that the Martians had wiped out all disease on their planet, but doesn't take it as a fact. The exact line goes as follows: "Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on Earth, have either never appeared on Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life." So going strictly by the book it's unclear which of these is the case, since of course we wouldn't have known something like that without interrogating the Martians at length and none were captured alive.

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