The War of the Worlds-Creation of alien stereotype

The idea of life on another planet is commonly shared in humanity since the discovery of other worlds. Human’s imagination is exceptional when it comes to imagine the different life forms there may be in the universe, with great range of descriptions in literature. H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds does not escape from this range. Commonly accepted as one of the most influential Science Fiction (SF) writers, Wells created a new vision of this “outer life” in his The War of The Worlds, defining what aliens should be for years to come. In this essay I will show how Wells managed to create our modern vision of alien life form in his book.

Introduction

Herbert George Wells, commonly known as H. G. Wells, was an exceptional writer during his lifetime. Heavily influenced by Darwinism and future war stories, he created famous works, one of them being The War of the Worlds, an influence that never faded. Divided into two books, The War of the Worlds presents the reader a first-person narrator, telling his experience during the attack of the Martians in England. The book contains an amazing and intriguing story, but even more, it includes events that are seen in modern movies, series, and books, as shown below.

From speculative fiction to future war stories to Invasion SF Literature, Wells created his mark by truly externalizing the enemy in his fiction. Brian Stableford explains:

“Although the expansion of the future war genre into a much broader speculative genre of ‘scientific romance’ was tentatively begun by others it was not until H. G. Wells got involved that anyone replicated Poe’s determination  to explore the utility of a whole range of narrative frameworks.”[I]

The Victorian Era, in which Wells lived, was known, among other topics, by the British colonialism and imperialism. The importance of this theme can be seen not only in future war stories[II] popularized after George T. Chesney’s account of ‘The Battle of Dorking’, but also in books of other literary genres, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness[III]. In The War of the Worlds the theme does not disappear, instead Wells manages to innovate it by subverting the roles of the colonized and the colonizer, in order to criticize the British empire. In the words of Károly Pintér, in his essay The Analogical Alien: Constructing and Construing Extraterrestrial Invasion in Wells’s The War of the Worlds,

“These two novels [The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds] doubtless provide early and classic examples of ‘conceptual breakthrough’ (Nicholls 255) for the contemporary late Victorian reading public, whose reassuring assumptions about the safety and reliability of their British social environment are radically challenged and upset by both stories”[IV].

Wells, therefore, makes the British the colonized instead of colonizers, and, his true innovation, brings the aliens, his Martians, as the colonizers. By doing so, Wells increase the depth of a fear shared in his time (the discovery that another country, an “Other”, is superior than the British population), for now it combines with the physical horror of the alien race. Such was the impact of this figure of the Martians, the fear only increased in time. However, it became so popularized, image and event alike, that it became a stereotype, removing the “fear” factor.

Development

The alien figure became popularized since the publication of The War of the Worlds. The most famous characteristic of the alien is the large head, with the chin in a v-shape, huge eyes, mostly black, and green or grayish skin (one of the reasons one name given to these aliens is “greys” or “grays”). The 21^st century reader of The War of the Worlds may find it difficult to disassociate the popular image of the “alien” when creating the image of the Martians in the novel, for there are few aspects of the modern “greys” that differ from the Martians:

“A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted and dropped saliva. […] A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth – above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes – were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty” [V] (highlighted by me).

This whole detailed description of the Martians show that Wells created what would become a stereotype of the extraterrestrials, revealing his extraordinary imagination and influence in society. Pulp magazines would be the ones to truly popularize the image in its covers[VI] and movies are the second to stablish the physical appearance of the aliens. From the directly influenced by the novel, such as Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) and Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), to generic live-action alien movies (Spielberg’s E. T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002); Greg Mottola’s Paul (2011)), to animation alien movies such as Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002), the physical characteristics of the Martians are visible in the aliens of the films. They all present a huge round head, most with a v-shaped chin, lipless mouths, enormous round black-coloured eyes and except for Stitch, from Lilo & Stitch, greyish leather-like skin. This shows how the author is impressive in his work, creating an image so shocking it remained in people’s imaginary until modern days.

Not only Wells created a trend set of alien appearance, he also created the way-of-being of the aliens, with some clichés of alien appearance, for example, the movement of the aliens. Wells described the Martians suffering to adjust to Earth’s atmosphere (“the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere”) and in many extraterrestrial stories there is a mention, at least, to this struggle. In Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, for example, it is mentioned the discomfort the Overlords may feel due to the gravity difference of the planets[VII]. Spielberg’s E. T. – The Extra-Terrestrial, although E. T. does not suffer from the atmosphere differences, he struggles with the distance from its family, being sick and making Elliot sick as well; not only that, all his (and his race’s) movements are slow, just as the Martians from The War of the Worlds are described to move, even if the reasons are different for both.

All that struggle described, combined with the unhuman appearance, may make the reader feel sorry for the Martians, however the story told, since the beginning, prepare you for the war that is to come. The opening of the book was written to make the reader feel uneasy and anxious, waiting for the narrative that is to come. This constant expectative, tension-building narrative has a base, as previously mentioned, in future war stories, and yet Wells shows again his innovative side, this time in the plot side.

1. G. Wells, in what concerns Invasion Literature, creates a new kind of “invasion” because he is the first to set aliens as the main opponent and the source of panic. Peter Fitting says that “science fiction often tries to imagine such meetings [mankind x aliens] ‘innocently’, without the greed and acquisitiveness which motivated the European voyages of discovery”[VIII], and Wells innovates in this aspect, for the alien x mankind first contact happens war-like. Before The War of the Worlds, as established by Fitting, at least in English literature, aliens were portrayed as another “country” for the British empire to colonize, or to partner up with. With the novel, the element of terror was inserted in such contact, as well described by Wells:

“This was the deputation. There had been a hasty consultation, and since the Martians were evidently, in spite of their repulsive forms, intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to show them, by approaching them with signals, that we too were intelligent. […] Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinct puffs […]. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. […] It was as if each man suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.”[IX]

As said by Fitting, “Wells’ invention of the alien as a monster will have a long life in the twentieth century”[X]. The monstrosity of the alien is not reduced to its physical appearance. The attack without a chance of communication reveal the psychological monstrosity, a way of Wells criticizing even more the British empire. War literature and future war stories already showed the horrors of war, sometimes of the colonization as well, however Wells managed to truly expose it; by subverting the roles of colonized and colonizer, as said before, he created a new kind of horror to his contemporary readers, for he managed to capture the essence of the fear the colonized people must have felt, as well as exposing some hypocrisies of the colonizers (as in the case of the Tasmanian population being eradicated[XI]). This new way of interpreting alien life forms remained for years, one of the greatest examples of “alien monster” being Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and its following sequels.

Finally, the other great influence Wells made in his The War of the Worlds is the space invasion itself. The author succeeded in stablishing a whole new sub-genre in SF. As mentioned before, the first meeting of alien and human race before Wells was commonly a travel story of mankind exploring other planets. Wells so professionally written novel set up the whole “alien invasion” sub-genre, and his influence in this was such that the sub-genre became so popular it also became stereotyped in popular media. The Doctor Who series every other episode is about alien invasion (similar to Wells, most aliens invade England, specifically London); Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End although it present us an alien invasion in which aliens try to improve the human race, contrary to Wells’ exterminators from Mars, just like Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, the sudden way of the invasion is the same of Wells’ novel (the alien ships simply appear on Earth); Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is about the discovery of an alien invasion the happened in the past. This sub-genre became so popular, with more and more imitators of Wells, as well as more stories influenced by The War of the Worlds, the common knowledge of the type of story broke the “fear” factor Wells stablished. It became a common knowledge what would happen in alien-invasion stories, and the progress of science made some aspects of it (sometimes the whole of it) more and more fictious, even ridiculous, creating parodies of the invasion as a consequence, which can be seen in the animations Chicken Little (2005, directed by Mark Dindall) and Monsters vs. Aliens (2009, directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon), as well as Tim Burton’s popular parody Mars Attacks! (1996).

Conclusion

H. G. Wells made his mark with The War of the Worlds, creating a whole new era of SF literature, simply by switching the roles of colonized and colonizer, and creating a “monstrous alien”, who would become so popular its own physical appearance would lack, in future years, the fear it should provoke, making movies such as Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night (2019) rely more on the impact the aliens make on Earth to build the tension instead of the aliens themselves. Peter Fitting openly states that “the first literary text in which the alien becomes interesting for its own sake is H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds”. By making the alien interesting per se, Wells innovated SF and by being such a huge accomplishment, his influence remains until today.

Although the sub-genre he created became laughable and parodistic, his novel can still prove alien invasion can be horrific and can cause discomfort. Especially because of his critic to British empire, the fear shown in the novel can be replicated in modern days. Spielberg managed to do it in his War of the Worlds, using the fear of terrorists instead of criticizing the British empire. The Doctor Who series, although most of invasions are comedic, and the alien characters majorly lack the quality of “monsters”, some episodes rely on the suspense, tension and horror Wells wrote in the novel, recreating the “alien monster” and terrible invasion type conceived by Wells. Thus, it is proven that The War of the Worlds was, is and will be one of the most important works of literature ever written, for H. G. Wells not only is a master in subtle, yet strong critics, he is also a incredible writer in what concerns tension-building and character creation, so much so that few writers after him managed to create a new popular image of alien life.

NOTES

[I] Brian Stableford, “Science fiction before the genre”, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23-4.

[II] For more information, check: Brian Stableford, “Science fiction before the genre”, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 22-3.

[III] The whole speech of Marlow concerning the romans (even though he denominates them conquerors, not colonists) summarizes the theme in the novel (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1902), 3-4).

[IV] Peter Fitting also makes a remark about Wells’ concern about the British empire in the novel: “[Wells] is not as interested in the inadequacy of British military preparedness (although that is also a theme in the novel), but in the rationale for British imperialism and colonialism. In these terms, as Bernard Bergonzi wrote, the novel may also be understood as ‘expressing a certain guilty conscience about imperialism’. (Peter Fitting,  “Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds”, in Learning from other worlds: estrangemente, cognition, and the politics of science fiction and utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham : Duke University Press, 2001), 132).

[V] H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2018), 26.

[VI] Peter Fitting,  “Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds”, in Learning from other worlds: estrangemente, cognition, and the politics of science fiction and utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham : Duke University Press, 2001), 135; Károly Pintér, The Analogical Alien: Constructing and Construing Extraterrestrial Invasion in Wells’s The War of the Worlds (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 18, 1-2, 2012), 134.

[VII] Arthur C. Clarke, O Fim da Infância, trad. Carlos Angelo (São Paulo: Aleph, 2010), 93.

[VIII] Peter Fitting,  “Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds”, in Learning from other worlds: estrangemente, cognition, and the politics of science fiction and utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham : Duke University Press, 2001), 127.

[IX] H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2018), 29-30.

[X] Peter Fitting,  “Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds”, in Learning from other worlds: estrangemente, cognition, and the politics of science fiction and utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham : Duke University Press, 2001), 134.

[XI] For more information, check: Jan Svoboda, “The Development of the Portrayal of Extraterrestrials in the Invasion Science-fiction Literature over the Past Century: From H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End to Stephenie Meyer's The Host” (Diploma thesis, Brno : Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2011).

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