The War of the Worlds - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Eve of War

So here’s what I know about the War of the Worlds going in,
1)ALIEN INVASION!!!!!
2)The aliens are martians with heat waves
3)Orson Welles freaked some folks out on the radio
4)There was a Tom Cruise movie with Dakota Fanning that I didn’t see

Overall: Hey there imperialism metaphors, I see you.

We begin our book with a narration stating that, from what I can gather, the invasion has already happened. Most of the story will instead be a flashback to when it was first occurring. HG Wells is fond of the first-person retrospective narration, I’m noticing. Here we begin with a litany of details about the planet Mars that are somewhat fascinating to consider. How the idea was apparently somewhat prominent (although I don’t know how true to life this is) that Mars may’ve had people on it who “would welcome a missionary enterprise”. Yeah, just from what little I know of this book, and the fact that I know Wells was a fan of social commentary, I can see the critique/commentary on British imperialism already beginning to show through.

While we don’t know when exactly the story is being narrated from, we know that the events described evidently takes place in the early twentieth century. Mars has been under observation from Earth for some time, and over the past few days, strange gas eruptions have been showing up on the planet’s surface. Immediately, the narrator (as yet, unnamed) begins to muse on how the popular conceptions of Martians as being primitive were turning out to be wholly reversed. Here, he launches into a critique of people “judging the Martians harshly” reasoning that humans have been fairly awful to animals, and Europeans to people of “primitive” cultures. Calling for people to not judge the Martians too harshly for their thinking of humans as lesser in turn.

This story, as I mentioned, seems to be largely told as flashback, with the narrator mostly spending this chapter talking about the final days before the Martians invaded Earth. It seems largely here to set up a “what we lost” kind of scene, in order to establish contrast. That said, if that’s the case I’m not sure that Wells does that very effectively. There are occasional mentions to how peaceful it was in those days, but they are largely not the focus of this chapter. Instead, the focus is largely on the disturbances being observed from Earth. Not even really the people’s reactions to these distrubances, just the anomalies themselves. It’s rather dry in that way I suppose. Either way, the narrator makes it clear immediately that Mars is sending ships that will arrive soon, and that, judging from his reminiscences, it isn’t going to go well.