ABSTRACT.— From its opening lines, The War of the Worlds is concerned with seeing, or comprehending, through reading and writing. H. G. Wells’s novel emerges from a cultural environment in which a lack of foresight and illit-eracy mark future-war stories and scientific discourse. Wells interrogates this cultural blindness and fosters competency by presenting his narrator as a scientific — that is, a knowing — spectator of the Martian invasion. The narrator strives to distinguish himself from those who exhibit nescience in relation to the attack. His insight proceeds from his ability to read — to comprehend and translate — what emerges from the Martian cylinders. The Martians figure as a prevision of a technologized future, and the narrator’s scrutiny of their features and annihilative machinery reveals a potentially dangerous element in humanity’s relationship to technology. This danger manifests in the Martians’ degenerate techn`, their transformation of the world into a totally mechanized and depersonalized system. Despite the for-bidding nature of this futuristic world, the possibility remains that it may be averted. This possibility lies in poi`sis, or artistic producing, which in The War of the Worlds culminates in the narrator’s rewriting of the invasion.
According to Heidegger, poi`sis constitutes a space for an essential reflection on the danger for humanity in technology. Wells’s novel offers an oppor-tunity for reflection on future humankind, embodied in the Martians, and its relationship to advanced technology by inviting readers to see alongside the narrator as he scrutinizes the Martians and their techn`. With The War of the Worlds, Wells suggests that science fiction must be knowing fiction.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a
man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.1
With these remarkable words, H. G. Wells’s narrator of The War of the Worlds commences his account of the Martian invasion. Critical attention to this passage has been focused on, for example, its reference to the micro-scope, its prefiguration of the Martians’ fate, or its undermining of an anthro-pocentric worldview. However, it is no less important to note that at the very outset, Wells foregrounds an act of seeing, a term I use here in its sense not only of observing phenomena, but also of comprehending them through careful consideration. Wells’s text as a whole suggests that to properly see, one must also have the insight needed to recognize an event’s importance, just as competent scientists bring their knowledge to bear on the world revealed by the microscope’s eyepiece. Although the passage above presents the Martians’ scrutiny of Earth as groundwork for their colonizing project, it also prefigures the narrator’s role during the invasion. It might be rephrased thus: “The narrator keenly and closely watches intelligences greater than man’s, scrutinizing and studying them as they busy themselves about their affairs, as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize transient creatures.” Here and throughout the novel, Wells advances his narrator as the exemplary seer of the Martian invasion, the spectator who both observes and comprehends its significance. Furthermore, expressed in the story’s time frame is a bridge between eras: the late-nineteenth-century mode of seeing is exposed as flawed or incomplete, while the narrator-spectator inaugurates a move toward a more penetrating means of seeing humanity in its relation-ship to its environment. On the one hand, the Martians’ epoch-making inva-sion enacts the transformation of Earth into an otherworldly setting, a literal reconfiguration of imperial England into something other.2Yet it also sig-nals a transition from an outmoded to a more critically modern way of grasp-ing humankind’s place in a world of advanced mechanization — a world not only of microscopes, but of unprecedented, annihilative technology.
This concern with seeing as comprehending is further illuminated if we situate The War of the Worlds within its context as a future-war narrative that was originally serialized in 1897. I. F. Clarke has demonstrated in his influential study Voices Prophesying War that nineteenth-century periodicals such as the Times and the Daily Mail vied for readership with savage tales of wars to come. Fin de siècle England was a locus for the convergence of
“increasingly powerful forces of mass journalism, mass literacy, and the mass emotions of extreme nationalism,” occasioning a marketplace inundated with
fantastic and fanatical stories (Clarke 57). Given the “immense popularity”
of these tales, most of which were well off target in foreseeing the nature of future war, Clarke points to “an extraordinary failure of the imagination,”
with most readers holding only “illusory expectations” regarding the next major conflict (59). In place of genuine insight and circumspection, Clarke insists, a “compound of complacency, ignorance, and innocence” comprised the “primary condition” for the generation and public consumption of these fictions (73). This journalistic miasma, then, formed a major component of the cultural mise-en-scène before which The War of the Worlds played out its scenario for its audience.
Clarke’s analysis suggests an interconnection between the acts of see-ing, readsee-ing, and writing during the formative years of future-war stories.
By failing to comprehend the dehumanizing consequences of rapid mecha-nization in warfare, contributors and consumers of speculative tales were in a way illiterate — that is, they were unable to properly write and read future war because they were unable to reasonably foresee it. This illiteracy stems from an unscientific — a term that in this essay conveys also an etymologi-cal sense akin to unknowing — aspect that manifests in two ways. First, spec-ulative war fictions frequently accentuated nationalist and sensationalist subject matter at the expense of plausibly depicting the effects of technolog-ical progress. Charles E. Gannon, who interrogates the influence that future-war stories had on subsequent weapons innovations, demonstrates that authors were sometimes accurate in their “‘microscopic’ view of specific tech-nological innovations,” thus preparing readers for “new military ‘realities’”
such as machine guns and tanks. However, he concurs with Clarke that they failed in their “strategic or ‘macroscopic’ perspective” (16). The macroscopic perspective here represents a deeper mode of seeing, and the unscientific aspect of future-war fiction lay not in its anticipation of the physical prop-erties of later weapons but in its miscomprehension of how those weapons would permanently alter war and humanity.3
Second, many Victorians adhered to an optimistic belief that scientific and technological progress “would put an end to all strife on earth” and bring about an era of “universal peace” (Clarke 4). Clarke, citing Darwin’s influence, finds “a fusion of evolutionary and progressive ideas” in stories published after the seminal 1871 future-war tale, George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (48). In war’s “savage struggle to survive,” Clarke sub-mits, “fitness meant military preparedness,” and the fittest nation — that with the most advanced weapons — would prevail so that humanity might progress
to a higher state (49, 50). More recently, Patrick B. Sharp has probed the yoking of Victorian ethnology to mechanization, proposing that Darwin-ism “provided a worldview not only for future scientists but also for histo-rians and fiction writers trying to account for the importance of race and technology in the modern world” (32). Technological advancement and racial ascendancy were inextricably linked in nineteenth-century minds as a result of such Darwinist discourse, and as Victorians gazed into their future, they often perceived an age dominated by civilized men, masters of unri-valed technology. Future-war fiction, which openly endorsed racist and nationalist sentiment and valorized a technologized futurity, contributed to this conviction that progress was assured. This belief persisted into the next century, for as Clarke dryly remarks, it took two world wars and the atomic bomb to fully expose the unscientific character of inevitable human progress and the inherent danger in technological advancement (5).
Nevertheless, Wells’s early work evidences an awareness of widespread illiteracy and unscientific beliefs, and in The War of the Worlds, he directly confronts unknowingness in seeing, reading, and writing the future. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes have shown that in his essays, Wells “den-igrates any pedagogy which seeks to inculcate mere fact without attending to the process of discovery and validation. ‘Not knowledge, but a critical and inquiring mental habit, is the aim of science teaching’— this is his con-stant theme” (2). Science is not scientific, then, if it neglects due consider-ation of its underpinnings and implicconsider-ations; rather, educconsider-ation must be knowing, not merely knowledgeable. Philmus and Hughes also note the
“pervasive antagonism to any idea the basis of which its adherents conspic-uously fail to recognize” that led Wells to espouse “opposite ideas,” or
“notions running counter to currently accepted opinion” (15, 105). This antagonism surfaces in Wells’s confrontations with the anthropocentric view that humans comfortably sit atop an evolutionary hierarchy according to which the world awaits their command. For Wells, careful consideration reveals the fallacy of that perspective, and with The War of the Worlds, he expands his critique of anthropocentricity to include humanity’s place in a progressively mechanized world. The novel draws attention to reading and writing in the context of future war, but it should also be approached as a corrective text that asks readers and writers to better see humanity within a highly technologized setting.
In what follows, I interrogate how the acts of reading, writing, and see-ing are crucial to Wells’s focus on humanity and technology. In
emphasiz-ing the interrelation of these acts, the novel traces a path by which the nar-rator, and ultimately the literate reader, might progress from unknowing-ness to competence and comprehension. Wells implies in The War of the Worlds that there is an intrinsic danger for humankind’s development in rapid mechanization, a danger that might be averted or counterbalanced only by endeavoring to grasp its possible effects. To elucidate the danger for future humanity implicit in Martian technology, I draw from Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. The War of the Worlds, an early model of modern science fiction, establishes a critical task for readers and writers of the future in its focus on the science — that is, the knowingness — of science fiction.