2023 read #10: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.*

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells*

205 pages

Published 1897

Read January 19

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

The War of the Worlds was the first complete, unabridged "grownup" book I read, way back when I was 9 years old. I read it and reread it obsessively all through my tweens and consistently (albeit less frequently) through my teens. It left more of a mark on my prose than I realized; reading it now, my first time revisiting it in adulthood, I'm struck by how my lengthy, multi-clause sentences echo Wells' late Victorian rhythms.

As a primordial exemplar of the science-fiction thriller, The War of the Worlds is an astounding book. Wells was an expert at incorporating elements of the mundane, all the little domestic and suburban touches, to heighten the strangeness and fear of his alien invasion. Scene after scene has lived rent free in my head all these years: the brilliant yellow sunset over the first Martian cylinder, the thunderstorm, the silent struggles in the dark with the curate. And these scenes haven't lingered solely because I read the book so early and so often.

As a blueprint for the eugenicist strain of manly men and breedable women that would infest science fiction for well over a century afterward, well... that part didn't age quite so gracefully. As a kid, I swallowed the "able-bodied, clean-minded" future laid out by "The Man on Putney Hill" without question; the artilleryman's shortfall, as far as I was concerned at 9, was in his inability to back up his big dreams with actual deeds. Reading it again at 40, it's a rotted morass of quasi-Darwinian bullshit, reeking of Victorian race theory. Countless libertarian power fantasies in the ensuing decades parroted this same strain of "our comfortable civilization will lead to decadence, we must Improve the Race through adversity!" I can't imagine anyone over the age of 9 taking this load seriously (like, say, a certain spoiled little boy who wants to reinvent serfdom on Mars with his daddy's Apartheid money).

On top of all that, War of the Worlds is distasteful for being an early exemplar of the "dystopia is when white people suffer through allegories of what white people actually did to everyone else" strain of SFF.

Regardless, this book will always have a special place in my life. I'm glad to have revisited it.