“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own…”

No one would until one, man H G Wells, imagined it in his War of the Worlds (first published in hardback 1898).

Here’s why it is a lockdown favourite of mine and why you should read or reread it now.

Every generation has it’s own War of the Worlds – although I have yet to watch the latest BBC adaptation (still available on iplayer). The War of the Worlds (1953 film) reimagined the Martian invasion for 1950s Cold War America. More recently Steven Speilberg again transposed it to modern America, bringing out it themes of personal survival against the odds in a post 9-11 world in his 2005 movie, loosely based on the book. In perhaps the most bizarre tribute to HG Well’s masterpiece a DVD called Visions of Mars, made by the Planetary Society,  containing the original story as well as an audio recording of the famous Orson Welles radio braodcast was landed on Mars itself by the Phoenix lander in 2008.

Wells’ Martians bring the mighty British Empire to its knees when it is at it’s strongest. The implication is that if the Martians can beat the British Empire the human race has had it. And from the perspective of the end of the nineteenth century you could say Wells had a point. The British Empire was at it’s strongest militarily. And so the battle for the planet is fought, perhaps incongruously to a modern reader, over the English Home Counties. However this kind of imaginary battle was not unknown to readers of the time: a whole genre of invasion fiction was spawned by The Battle for Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer published in 1871. By the time war really did break out in 1914 over 400 stories and books had been published with invasions usually from France and then increasingly from Germany.

When I was younger, I was engrossed in the author’s realistic descriptions of the rapid disintegration of society. The Martian attack with their superior technology and weapons echoed the colonialists defeat of less developed human nations around the world. It served for its original British Edwardian readers both as a salutory reminder of what it was to be on the wrong end of a superior military-industrial complex but also of the fragility of their superiority. Because in the end it is not the might of the British Army, or even the British Navy, whose defeat is described so powerfully and poignantly by Wells, that stops the Martian machines in their tracks. It is, of course, (spoiler alert) germs.

Now as I read it, it means something different to me.  I walked past a building site yesterday, now silent and deserted. Seeing the the abandoned machines in the silence reminded me of Well’s London after the Martian attack: the Martians have been defeated by “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth”.

And I thought, maybe we are the Martians now.