What you consume affects what you produce. I’ve been thinking a lot about this mindset over the past few months, especially when I pick up a book. Classical authors like Jane Austen and Alexandre Dumas have a certain charm, their developed culture, characters, and insighting incidents so foreign. Yet the themes, morals, and struggles are timeless, which is why many still read them today.
Since I want to write a book that extends beyond the 21st century, I decided to take inspiration from these novels. Normally I develop a culture I scribbled in my notebook, but today I’m studying the work of H. G. Wells. More specifically, I’m looking at War of the Worlds and the devolving culture and humanity of the characters.
When the Aliens Land
Similarly to Jules Verne in Journey to the Center of the Earth, we’re dropped into the mind of a generic scientist fascinated by celestial bodies. His home in England resembles any old neighborhood. Friendly people willing to offer assistance, rambunctious children getting into trouble. Money exchanged for services, “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am” common greetings.
When the aliens land, it’s business as usual. Everyone’s curious but not concerned. Even when the ship opens and destruction follows, the general unease doesn’t panic people. The military arrive, adding a new hierarchal order. Lives are mourned and people wonder what’s lurking in the space debris.
Another thing to note here because it’ll be pertinent later is that major cities like London are completely unaffected. Morning headlines talk of the strange occurence, but the bustling city life continues with only an addition of fantastical rumors.
Culture and Morality Collapse Unceremoniously
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning–the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisation, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body.
War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells. Book 1, Chapter 16, pg 107.
Choosing one quote was tricky because H. G. Wells weaves in the destruction and chaos with expert skill. Once the aliens strike, the slow casualness of the book becomes erratic. Our main character barely escapes with his life while his brother in London follows the crowd. Both of their experiences reveal the detrimental power of fear.
Let’s start with the masses. The stream of people so described above is given more detail throughout the next couple chapters. People getting run over by overflowing trains and trampled by carriages and horses. Injured soldiers proclaiming the end of the world while children scream for their mothers. Dirty faces, grimy hands. Silence is deadly, for that’s when men steal carriages from defenseless women and abandoned chateaus are plundered and burned. Yet when the Martians are in sight, they kill more trying to escape.
Our main character’s story grips me the most. He barely survives and teams up with a curate (pastor). They don’t exactly get along, the curate definitively mad. But they make do, avoiding the Martians and hunkering in a destroyed city. But when the curate begins to rave and alert the Martians, fear ensnares our main character. He saves his own life, leaving the other to die.
In both scenarios, human value goes out the window. People lose their minds, focused on whichever priority keeps their feet moving (personal safety, children’s safety, so on). Some don’t even have that hope, hobbling with glassy stares. Morality and common decency are forgotten, fear and desire pushing ordinary people to undertake heinous tasks. Only the strongest of wills remember civilized behavior until the Martians cease to exist.
The End of the War
My father loves disaster movies. Maybe it’s a Florida thing, but he loves crazy weather and the forces of nature battering against man-made structures. Thankfully we haven’t seen something like Day After Tomorrow in real life, but according to the characters at the end, everything would be fine. Chaos, then business as usual.
H. G. Wells takes an approach that’s more realistic and still grips me to this day:
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells. Book 2, Chapter 10, pg 205.
This final line of the book wraps a chapter of life coming together. Later generations look back at the chaos like a myth. But the generation of the Martian attack, the people that survived the tumult, can’t look beyond. Fear brought the worst and best out of many, primarily the worst. And they have to remember those atrocities, atone for those mistakes, for the rest of their lives. They may be alive, but part of them is buried with the souls taken by the attack.
So we have a double culture taking effect: the new civilized society and the walking dead. As much as one might want to understand the other, they can’t. The walking dead can’t return to the carefree days of dinner with the neighbors and weekend trips to London. The civilized society will never be bombed by Martians and fighting just to survive. Despite this, they coexist. One knowing the dangers of mindless fear, and the other primed to repeat those mistakes.