Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Re: About that... | |
| Posted By: Anton P. Nym (aka Steve) <sumpca@yahoo.com> | Date: 4/4/09 11:30 a.m. |
In Response To: About that... (BlueNinja) : I'm reading through War of the Worlds, and some parts strike me as very... : odd . So, this massive alien cylinder crashes in the middle of a field, : freaky aliens crawl out, and then this huge heat ray starts melting people : left and right and centre. What does the protagonist do? : He goes home, and has a meal with his wife. Same for a lot of people there,
: As I was reading, I got slightly annoyed by the way everyone was acting...
Wells was making social commentary about the era in that. At the time War of the Worlds came out, the British Empire was the most powerful state on the planet... there was a certain, well, arrogance that came from that in the well-to-do set; wars were generally fought far away and generally were won by the brave troops. So naturally they would assume that the Thin Red Line would crush these foreigners and send them packing. Besides, fighting is dirty work unfit for gentlemen, save maybe for a few officers of good social standing. But Wells wasn't playing by those rules; Wells instead decided to have the Martians out-British the British in their colonial tendancies and be so utterly crushing in their technological lead that they were to the British Army what the British Army was to the native bow-and-spear resistance to "alien" oppressors at the time. And as happened so often before to the British advantage, that the locals were complacent until the overwhelming power of these strange conquerors became too obvious to ignore and too great to oppose, Wells had happen to the UK. (And yeah, having native diseases do more to the invaders than the Army was also a shot at the Colonial administration of the time.) -- Steve knows that Wells wrote with an eye to social commentary; it was Verne who tried to see where technologies would take humanity in the future.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |