As it’s on my curriculum, I recently re-read The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Being by Wells, it is full of brilliantly realized, prescient ideas and characters who are either variations on Wells himself or caricatures of people he didn’t like (Wells, so far as I have read him, only ever created one really striking and fully-realized character in his entire writing career, and that’s Griffin the Invisible Man). Having read it shortly after Life in a Jar, I was struck by how prescient Wells was in predicting the impact of modern war on civilian populations.

But what really surprised me, upon thinking it over, was that I actually don’t buy the way the war ends. That is, given the scenario presented by Wells, I don’t think the Martians would have actually won in the end, even if they hadn’t been wiped out by disease.

The first point where I find Wells unconvincing is his cynical assumption that the British government and organized resistance would fold almost at once after the Martians march on London. Considering how psychotically tenacious the British government was when it came to expending money and blood in a contest over what amounted to bragging rights (World War One), I don’t think they’d be such pushovers in an actual fight for survival. What I think would have been a more believable scenario would be that the British army would retreat after losing London, regroup, and figure out a way to work around the Martian technology. Then they’d try again – perhaps in modified iron lungs to survive the black smoke – probably take one or two war machines down, get wiped out, repeat.

Even if the British government folded like…well, the modern British government, the rest of the world certainly would be hard at work on ways to deal with the Martians. Sooner or later, the humans would win.

The big issue is that the Martians simply don’t have the numbers to win. Wells is fairly explicit that there are only thirty to fifty Martians on Earth. More may possibly come in later years, and they can reproduce asexually, but for now that’s all they’ve got.

Combined with the fact that the Martians are not only not invincible, but actually have to periodically get out of their machines to work on them means that the humans have a chance of taking them down. An obvious strategy would be to send out scouts or hunters to try to creep up close enough to the Martian nests in order to shoot them when they come out of their machines (since we know from the farmhouse sequence in the book that it’s possible to move about in the vicinity of the Martians without their being aware).

You’d lose a lot of men that way, but given the numerical advantage and the fact that it’s a war for survival, the humans could potentially lose a million men to take out one Martian and still consider it a winning exchange.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that the book is supposed to be an allegory for colonialism, and obviously the above scenarios didn’t play out despite vast population advantages in Africa, India, etc. in compared to the British army.

But this is where the allegory breaks down: first in the fact that there is a difference between being conquered by human beings who may be tyrannical and oppressive, but ultimately only want to rule you, and being conquered by extraterrestrials who want to use people as food. The latter, once it sunk in that this was the situation, would have to create a very different reaction. To be conquered is psychologically acceptable in a way that being farmed is not.

The other is just that the British were not the Tasmanians: Tasmania had no tradition of organized technological development or robust relations with numerous other nations with similar such traditions. There is a difference between a fairly isolated, tribal society facing organized firearms and a well-organized, developed civilization facing alien monsters.

Side note: Wells seems wedded to the idea of comparative levels of evolution to the point of not thinking them through. Because the Martians are more technologically developed than man, he says that they are to men as men are to beasts. Except, of course, there is a vast difference between “lower technology” and “no technology.” The effort to read men as simply over-developed animals falls apart as soon as it is examined.

The point is, when you look at it objectively, the scenario in the book is actually not as hopeless as Wells presents it.