The War of the Worlds - Chapters 4 and 5

Chapter 4: The Cylinder Opens and Chapter 5: The Heat-Ray

Well dang, that’s quite the description

Not much more than the description, but I like the way that the crowd immediately seems to have their preconceptions shattered by the arrival of martians which are not remotely human. Instead, the martians are… well, alien. Their descriptions defy easy categorization and I think that’s a good choice by Wells in describing that these beings are not anything like what th people here suppose they are like. Instead of greeting the Martians as they emerge from the cylinder, the people retreat to a safe distance out of fear.

It’s a pretty solid description though. They’re tentacular and “fungoid” in appearance. They seem to make some kind of noise, but in general they’re monstrous enough that running away is a perfectly believable response. One man falls into the pit with the Martians.

I feel like shit’s about to really hit the fan.

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Well there you go.

I think it’s hard to write a book like this in some fashion, and I’m wondering where the story is going to take us.
In a way this is rather similar to the Morlocks in The Time Machine. A nameless narrator is giving us an account of his encounter with some strange creatures that are staged as faceless/interchangeable bad guys. I’m reminded in some ways of World War Z and I wonder if the book will kind of go along that route, chronicling the initial days of societal collapse as the Martians go. I honestly think that too much attention on the Martians would probably be detrimental to the story, as they are basically just a force of nature without any seeming character.

That said, they are a horrifying force. When one of the Martians re-emerges from the pit in the evening, now in its more widely known tripodal form, it shoots out a heat wave, seemingly without provocation, and scorches a number of people and the land surrounding the pit in a single swipe. Our narrator is left horrified and turns tail, crying as he runs. A pretty understandable response, but I wonder if there are ways around this heat weapon. It passed over the narrator as he was hidden by some heather, so it would stand to reason that cover does help somewhat. Could heavier material fare better against the Martians?