The Martians are Coming!

I've been putting my toe into the water of speculative and science fiction lately (I think Margaret Atwood describes a distinction between these two quite well). I'm in the middle of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, first published in 1898. When  a radio play based on this little book was broadcast in 1938 (on Halloween) produced by Orson Welles as if it were a News broadcast, the word was that people were convinced that the Martians really were coming, and a panic occurred.

Not so in the book itself, which describes a world in denial, slow to come to its senses, a world confident in its own ability to continue as usual,  and trust that everything will be all right in the end. In the process the Martians are wiping out everything in their path and people are dropping left, right and centre.

The book is spooky in its ability to describe scenes that might have been borrowed from descriptions of what was to occur just sixteen years after its publication - the horror of the First World War. And he makes some astute observations about the almost desperate desire to remain apathetic in the face of a force that seems too big to comprehend, and this could hold a mirror not only to the future back then (think the rise of the Nazis, and the sluggish response of the world to that) but also to our imminent future. The book made me think of our current response (our apparent inability to respond) to global climate change, or a desire to respond only to those events as they begin to directly impact our personal lives.

The other thing that occurred to me is that reading this book at the end of 2012 provides the present-day reader with an opportunity that the first readers didn't have - a Martian view of the Earth and its inhabitants. How strange time and space on Earth was back then. You don't really get the sense of it in a contemporary period piece movie. 

It's worth reading old books, if only for this - as a kind of amateur anthropologist. Such are the benefits of the temporary psychological displacement that reading an old novel can provide. While we're at it, if we were to project ourselves forward to 2112, I wonder how current technology, actions, lives, beliefs, will be experienced? Someone should write about it.

Books are great, aren't they!  Old and new.  Let's keep them coming.

Happy writing.