The War of the Worlds (Compare & Contrast)

Compare & Contrast

• 1898: One of the most frightening aspects of the Martian invasion is when they master the concept of flight, giving them the ability to spread their dominance across the globe.
  Today: Humans have been able to fly since the Wright Brothers were able to attain lift-off at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.
• 1898: Wells presents interplanetary travel as being a matter of a canister projected from Mars to Earth like a bullet from a gun.
  Today: Humanity understands the principles of rocket propulsion well enough to explore the far reaches of our solar system.
• 1898: In the novel, Wells describes lakes of water on Mars, visible through telescopes.
  Today: For a long time, theories about Martian water have been discredited as a misinterpretation of the visible data; however, in recent years, probes on the surface of Mars have determined that there is in fact significant water.
• 1898: The only means of communication are telegraphs. When the Martians are a few miles away from London, people in the city go about their ordinary business, unaware.
  Today: Wireless phones with video capabilities make it possible for an average citizen to send sound and images from any remote corner of the world.

The roots of this division of Europe came in 1871, when Prussia conquered France. Prussia, the kingdom state that included Germany, sought to prevent France from coming back at some future time to take back the land that had been taken from it by forming alliances with first Austria-Hungary and, later, Russia. By the 1880s, Germany had signed on to a Triple Alliance with Italy and Austria-Hungary. Britain, France, and Russia, in turn, signed on to a Triple Entente, promising to defend each other in case of attack. By the time Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in the late 1890s, all of the nations of Europe were aligned with one of these organizations. The balance of military power was strictly monitored and maintained: for instance, the German naval build-up in the 1890s spurred Great Britain to pour resources into their own navy, which caused Italy, France, the United States, and Japan to follow suit. The political scene in which Wells wrote about the Martian invasion was a stable one, then, but one that was expected to explode.

The military melee that was expected throughout Europe did not actually occur until nearly twenty years later. When it did, though, it followed a course that by then seemed inevitable. When Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by Serbians in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within a week, Germany, France, and Russia were involved, and days later Belgium, Great Britain, and Japan were drawn in. By the time of the war's end four years later, ten million had died, and twenty million were wounded.

Darwinism

One of the greatest influences on scientific thought at the end of the nineteenth century was the theory of biological evolution that had been put forward by the British naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin's theory of natural selection, which posits that organisms evolve over the course of generations, is prominent in The War of the Worlds, particularly in the way that the Martians are said to have lost any need for bodies or sexual reproduction, and in the way that the bleak fate of humanity is viewed as perhaps regrettable but nonetheless unavoidable.

In 1859, Darwin outlined his theories in his book On the Origin of the Species. Based on observations made in previously unexplored regions of the South Pacific, he concluded that similar species were actually related to each other, and that those that had grown up under different circumstances had evolved in ways that best suited their individual environments. The book was a sensation after its publication, and the theory of evolution was applied to other fields as well, leading to such concepts as Herbert Spencer's competitive "social darwinism" to explain the survival of some social traits over others. One of Wells's teachers, T. H. Huxley, has been recognized as perhaps the single most influential writer to popularize Darwinism.