WAR FROM MARS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 116, 12 November 1938, Page 29

WAR FROM MARS

'A -PLAY AND A PANIC

WELLS'S FAMOUS ROMANCE

(Written for the "Evening Post" * fey A.M.)

i. Some resemblance may possibly be found between the irony or downright invention that deceives in print -and the extraordinary effect of the broadcast in the United States of a dramatic version of Mr. H. G. Wells's scientific romance, "The War .of the Worlds." Defoe wrote about dissenters itt a way that delighted the Tories until they found he was poking fun at tfeem, whereupon they put him in the pillory. In "A Fair Haven," Samuel Butler gave the world what seemed to be a defence of the Christian faith and was accepted as such by many! murchmen, but was really a subtle attack. In our own country a journalist invented the finding of the Ark on Ararat, and his story not only was joyfully received by some New Zealanders as confirmation of Genesis, but went round the world. In these cases the intelligence of readers was at fault. In America it was the intelligence of listeners. Perhaps the listeners had more excuse, because in reading the whole text is available for reconsideration. One lesson of the American sensation is that one should listen intelligently, and the beginning of intelligent listening is to listen from the beginning. Though full details are lacking, there seems little doubt , that the cause of most of the panic! in America was switching on the set, or the mind, after the story had begun, and thereby missing the essential explanation that the whole thing was j imaginary. But. of course, there are different kinds of explanation. The broadcasting station defended itself by saying that four times in the course of the play it had announced that the thing was fictitious, whereupon a policeman remarked that "the radio guys use high-falutin' words nobody can understand." Presumably what the announcer should have said ; in introducing the play was: "Now youse iguys, doan fergit we're only kiddin'." Or is this an argument for a Hendon Police College in the United States? "THE WAR OF THE WORLDS/ The story that gave rise to this extraordinary misunderstanding may be secondary in interest to the psychological problems raised, but it is worth some consideration, especially as there is reason to believe it is not so well known as it should be. Modern astronomy has caused people to be more interested in Mars than in any of the other planets. Apparently there is a greater chance of human life, or an approximation to it, having developed there than anywhere else, and some think the evidence for such existence is impressive. Writers as wide apart as George dv Maurier and Edgar Rice Burroughs have brought Mars into their stories; I remember one tale called "Honeymoon in Space," in which a young couple went round the planets in an airship with about as little trouble as a yachtsman would experience between Auckland and Russell. "The War of the Worlds" is in a class by itself. It is an early Wells, though by 1898 he had written a string of books, including several other scientific romances. Among these were "When the Sleeper Wakes," "The Time Machine," "The Invisible Man," and "The Food of the Gods." If I remember rightly, "When the Sleeper Wakes" depicted a society in which cities were crowded with pleasureseekers and agriculture was carried on by slaves and machines. One touch in' which a condition of our own day was anticipated was the provision of mechanised voices to control crowds, like our loud-speakers, "Th.c War of the Worlds" was the first of Mr. Wells's books to make a national appeal, arid, reading it again after a lapse of time, one is not surprised. The conception of a visit of Martians in steel cylinders, equipped for conquest, was daring and brilliant, and the telling of the devastation they wrought and their speedy downfall through natural causes, was masterly. And here was not an excursion into a future that was little the concern of the living, or a scientific fantasy affecting a group of people, but terror in contemporary London, a heat ray that shrivelled everything in its path and smoke that rolled death along the ground. WELLS THE ARTIST. Perhaps there are still some people who hold that as a novelist Mr. Wells will live, not by the lengthy didactic sociological and often "triangular" novels of his middle and later period, but by his earlier romances of love and of science. Fifteen years ago an English critic, who is also a poet land a novelist, said that in the future Mr. Wells would seem to have been a gi*eat figure in the intellectual life of his time, but his books would be ruthlessly winnowed. He would select for possible survival "The Island of Dr. Moreau," "The Food of the Gods," "The Invisible Man," and perhaps "The Time Machine," "Tono-Bungay," and "Mr. Polly," and all the short stories collected with "The Country of the Blind." If I may add something of my own, what about "Kipps"? It is noteworthy that the latest date on the above list is 1910. To return to ''The War-of the Worlds," .the public were far from appreciating the real qual-, ity of Mr. Wells's scientific romances, » and it may be doubted if even today he is given full credit. Mr. Compton Mackenzie records that as a schoolboy, with his head, full of aesthetics, he re- : garded with contempt the remark of ; another boy that Wells was the com- ; ing man. To him, as to many others, Mr. Wells was only another Jules ' Verne. The parallel has often been drawn, but it is not fair to Mr. Wells. In range of imagination and gift of words he is far the greater man, and in the application of science to his . tales he is much more thorough. "Put [ side by side Jules Verne's airship in '. 'The Clipper of the Clouds' and the , mechanical devices which Mr. Wells invents for his Martians," says Mr. , Edward Shanks. "In the first case the , existence of the machine is asserted : and the reader must make a round i thumping act of faith. before getting further into the story. But the ; Martians' fighting machines and hand- . ling-machines are visualised, are made i to work before our eyes with touches 1 of description and explanation (and ■'. confession of ignorance) so cunningly i applied that, for as long as we are ' reading, the difficulty of believing in « &>era, fc almost negligible^ Mis, [Wells* 5

is a trained scientist, with a passio:

for science, and tHere is always a scientific plausibility for his imagin-i ings. Also, being a literary artist, he knows what to leave out. He tells us a good deal about the Martians themselves, but not more than about the machines. Those directing beings that were all brain are left in somewhat shadowy outline, and there is a subtle appeal to our imagination to fill in details. The menace and the horror of the whole thing are thereby heightened. THE DEATH RAY. There are many scenes in the book that live in the memory, and one may find a melancholy interest in compar- j ing what happened in this imaginary war with what might have happened if peace had not been made (or, should we say, patched up?) at Munich. To me the most thrilling moment is when j the narrator hides in the coal cellar and the Martian, having removed the body of the curate, puts a tentacle in- j to the cellar and feels around. The feeler touches the man's boot, but takes away only a lump of coal. Then there is the heat ray, which blasts away opposing artillery and sears through the steel of a warship as if it were paper. Every month or so today we hear of a death ray being invented. It is not unknown in New Zealand. Science in its perversion may yet give us this appalling weapon, as it has given us something like the Martians' smoke, in poison gas. The exodus from London became a frantic rout, "a stampede gigantic and terrible —without order and without a goal— six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong." The terror from which they fled could not have been foreseen. Today everyone knows what may come, and evacuation on a huge scale is being planned. But perhaps the most effective stroke in the book is the agency that destroys the Martians. They were slain, "after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth." There were no bacteria on Mars, and directly the invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, man's miscroscopic allies began to work their overthrow.

And let me conclude with this sentence: "The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects (the Martians'), enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts." Is not the civilisation of the earth in danger from similar conditions?