I sometimes think The War of the Worlds is the Victorian equivalent of Iain M. Banks’s ‘Outside Context Problem’.

You know the idea: you’re happily going about your business, secure in your understanding of the universe and your place in it. Then something turns up from beyond your frame of reference and makes a complete nonsense of your assumptions.

The Martians are pretty good at this.

I’ve used the moment when the narrator first sees one of them in class for years. Before the heat-ray, before the destruction, before the panic, Wells makes us look at the Martian, with all kinds of interesting similes demonstrating just how ‘alien’ it is: a Martian can only be described by comparing it to a host of familiar things.

So Wells gives us a good look at the newcomer … and then civilisation starts unravelling incredibly quickly.

That’s always fascinated me about the novel. The Martians don’t merely defeat the British military. They expose how fragile all the things we associate with civilisation actually are: technology, communications, government, the army, London, the Empire itself.

And there is a deliciously uncomfortable imperial reversal here.

Britain was very good at arriving somewhere else with superior technology, taking possession of territory and regarding the inhabitants as lesser beings. Wells simply turns the telescope around.

Suddenly we’re the primitive civilisation.

I love comparing ‘The War of the Worlds’ with ‘Dracula’.

They appeared within months of one another in 1897, and both imagine England being invaded by blood-consuming creatures from elsewhere.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Both novels belong to a culture increasingly anxious about invasion, empire, national identity and what happens when the supposedly secure boundaries of British civilisation become permeable.

And Wells keeps returning to versions of the same hubristic attitude.

The Time Traveller assumes progress equals improvement.

Dr Moreau assumes scientific intelligence gives him the right to remake life.

Griffin (The Invisible Man) discovers that extraordinary knowledge doesn’t necessarily make you a particularly admirable human being.

(Victor Frankenstein would recognise these kindred spirits. Heads up: he may or may not reappear in the blog at the end of the week).

Wells seems repeatedly fascinated by what happens when intelligence outruns sympathy.

Which brings us back to today’s quotation:

Slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Slowly.

Surely.

No panic. No rush.

Just a superior intelligence working out how to achieve its goals.

Perhaps that’s the really frightening thing about an Outside Context Problem.

It isn’t necessarily that something more powerful has arrived. It’s that it has a view on your world that has never crossed your mind.

Happy Wells Day.

And, if you heard Richard Burton‘s voice while reading that quotation, I’m afraid that’s between you and Jeff Wayne. You’re welcome!

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Join the conversation: tell me about your relationship with HG Wells, or let me know which other texts really illustrate that Outside Context Problem.