YMMV / The War of the Worlds (1898)

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: The Martians have no colonial/imperial ambitions; they view humans as pests to be exterminated or cattle to be consumed, rather than subjects to be ruled over. The narration compares humans to the bison and the dodo, to ants and to rabbits whose warren is destroyed by homebuilders. The only comparison to an act of the British Empire is to a case of genocide rather than of colonial rule. The Martians seed the Earth with Alien Kudzu which destroys Earth plants (until it meets the same fate as the Martians themselves). The entire story, including comparisons drawn by the narration, looks like a picture of habitat destruction leading to the extinction of native species, rather than of imperial conquest. So did Wells intend a Green Aesop rather than the anti-colonial one usually assumed? Given that he was ahead of his time in advocating for ecological conservation, at a time when not even biologists thought that was an issue, it’s at least possible. On the other hand, many imperial powers did view the "other" human as animalistic groups to be exterminated as well, and did ravage a lot of the local land in the name of industrialization and "progress", so it's likely both interpretations can work in tandem.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • There's a certain level of debate over whether the Artilleryman is the Only Sane Man or hopelessly deluded in his plans. Eventually, the Narrator concludes the latter but a lot of what he says is at least semi-plausible if the aliens are meant to be a critique of colonialism.
  • It is mentioned that the Martians, on their home planet, fed off pale-skinned, human-like creatures. Depending on in what light you want to paint the Martians, some say those human-like creatures were just as sapient as Earth humans, surviving specimens of the original humanoid species it is speculated the main Martians were mutated from — while others would say the Martians didn't initially mean to be as savage in their takeover as they ended up being, having taken their cattle with them, but were forced to start hunting down Earth humans when their cattle died on the way.
• Delusion Conclusion: Since the narrator states that going insane would be a mercy now that the Martians are almost certainly going to win - and only after this do the Martians all die from a vulnerability to terrestrial bacteria - a theory has arisen that he actually did go mad and the rest of the book is his hallucination of mankind victorious and safe. This theory is so famous that practically every literary critic who discusses the book brings it up as a possibility, sometimes claiming that it’s more plausible than what really happens.
• Genius Bonus: When Wells describes the Martians as essentially being big hands attached to even bigger brains and this coming from the writings of "a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute", he's actually talking about himself and one of his pre-Time Machine essays. He wrote suggesting that the "brain with a hand" model was the ultimate evolutionary path for humanity. The bouncing thing seen at the end of the world during The Time Machine is an earlier iteration of the idea, though it was not as explicit in that novel.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Unsurprisingly for a story involving Humongous Mecha, the book is well-loved in Japan. One of the illustrations done for the Japanese translation, featuring a particularly cephalopod-like interpretation of the Martians has become so iconic as to be considered the default depiction of aliens in Japanese media for decades, including serving as the inspiration for the Mars People of Metal Slug fame.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The book's references to the use of poison gas by the Martians were scary enough in 1898, but after World War I...
  • A similar thing happens in the Orson Welles version. Their take on the Thunderchild scene involved a bomber performing a Heroic Sacrifice by crashing into a Tripod. A tactic the Allied servicemen in the Pacific would become all too familiar with a few years down the line...
  • The artilleryman in particular is a disturbingly prophetic figure. Even though he does not have the will to follow suit with these plans, the ideas that came up with do sound a lot like the things thought thirty years later by a group of people in Germany with good dress sense and a tendency to march without bending their knees led by a certain rejected art student and war veteran.
  • At the year 1898, the thoughts of a war so brutal that entire cities could be destroyed to the ground en masse were considered as paranoid nonsenses and wild fantasies, especially if they were about this kind of war between the "civilized" European nations...
  • The Orson Welles version, which was broadcast in October 1938, took place a year later and noted that "the war scare" was over...
  • One of the reasons for the invasion was that the Martians had run out of the resources needed to maintain their own civilization on Mars. Our own civilization is dependent upon resources such as oil and as we consume more of it at the same time we run out of the more easily accessed goos, this results in all sorts of complicated geo-politics, wars and even a genocide or two ensuring that the oil must flow...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Unbelievably inhuman creatures with plenty of tentacles arriving from outer space, beings so immeasurably alien we don't stand a chance in fighting them, and implications of our own inevitable doom in a universe that at best seems completely indifferent to what happens to us, not to mention a certain degree of insanity that comes from realizing our insignificance. Sound familiar? Well, good ol' H. P. Lovecraft would have been a child when this book was published, predating just about everything he wrote.
  • The name of the military leader that battles the Martians at Weybridge and Shepperton is Brigadier-General Marvin.
  • The aliens that the invaders take with them as food source neatly fit the description of The Greys.
  • The aliens' use of heat rays, now that the US Army is working on utilizing high energy lasers in warfare. Really, for lasers in general, as the book was published twenty years before the first theoretical foundations of lasers were known. Especially so considering that Wells would also predict tank warfare, aerial combat and nuclear weapons, though obviously reality was different than how he initially described them. Slightly; Wells' vision of nuclear bombs was of the radioactive decay being increased so it exploded continuously instead of everything exploding at once.
  • Human examination of the Martian tripods describes them as using electrically/magnetically manipulated sliding devices, rather than gears, pulleys, or anything based on the wheel. Modern readers will view this as a steampunk version of a "mechanical muscle".
• It Was His Sled: The fact that the Martians are all but unstoppable by regular means but eventually get sick and die, which is usually the case in most adaptations.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Famous, but rarely read or watched.
• Once Original, Now Common: Alien attacks are so common in popular culture that this would not stick out to a modern reader/viewer.
• Spiritual Successor: The War of the Worlds is arguably this to The Crystal Egg, a short story written by Wells the same year, featuring an optical gateway to Mars. Martians and their machines are described, although the events in The War of the Worlds are not clearly foreshadowed.
  • The Tripods, a series of young-adult novels by John Christopher, is in all but name a sequel set in an Alternate Continuity where the Martians were successful in dominating the world.^note Except Christopher's aliens are three-legged chlorine-breathers from a (different star's) world with higher gravity than Earth, and they took over via Mind Control ("The Trippy Show") rather than war.
  • There was, of course, an actual (and, very dubiously, claimed to be "authorized") sequel. It was almost entirely unrelated to the original book (setting the original invasion in Boston, America, among other things) and involved the cannibalisation of Martian technology by Earthly masterminds, including the man who both supported the publication of and lent his title to the book. This was called (and was, indeed, about) Edison's Conquest of Mars.
  • And there's also The Second War Of The Worlds which involves would-be Quislings helping the Martians overcome their lack of a viable immune system and travel between parallel universes. Oh, and the hero is Sherlock Holmes, so you can probably guess at the actual quality of the work.
  • Independence Day is an obvious Expy for the book and film. Instead of a biological virus, they're brought down by a computer virus.
  • One of the most famous evil alien races in fiction, the Daleks of Doctor Who, are essentially miniature legless tripods with one-eyed Martian Nazis inside, sporting a Death Ray rather than a Heat Ray.
• Values Resonance: "Being on the receiving end of imperialism sucks" still rings true, especially the dismissal of native peoples as being little more than vermin at worst and sub-human at best. Multiple arguments against the foreign policies of the current great powers are that it's repackaged Victorian Imperialism. In fact, Spielberg's adaptation largely draws on both the fears of 9/11 and the subsequent fears of foreign peoples whose nations were the target of military operations in The War on Terror by Western countries.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: It is a classic novel and such, but it's in no way for kids. Especially some of the graphic descriptions of the Martians, and the dark psychological study of how people might react to such an invasion. One wonders why they make kids 12-14 read it in schools.

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