So, once again, with his super-intelligent, non-emotional, telepathic, bio-mechanical, tentacled aliens, Wells sets a twentieth century science-fiction trend. (Even the creator of the seminal computer game 'Space Invaders' admits to designing his aliens after seeing early illustrations for The War of the Worlds). But there is more to Wells' vision than simply bug-eyed monsters. Time and again Wells uses the Martian's evolutionary superiority to expose the biological arrogance of man and undermine his claim as the pinnacle of nature. The book opens with the revelation that mankind has been being scrutinised by the Martians, "perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same." Elsewhere, humans are referred to as ants in comparison to the Martians, or rats, or as bees and wasps with their pitiful guns that do little more than sting the alien machines. For each big fish, it seems, there is a bigger fish waiting to strike: "And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence [Darwin's phrase], and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars." The Earth is crowded only "with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them."
Far from condemning the Martians, the Narrator seems constantly keen to justify their actions by drawing attention to human behaviour: "And before we judge them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior race. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" He attempts to accustom himself to the idea of the Martian injecting themselves with human blood with the thought that "we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit." And the fate of the humans is painted as just - or rather as unjust - as the fate of the creatures that mankind dominates and destroys. A reminder of this fate is even found within an expression of human arrogance: before the Martians let loose their terrible power on the humans, even the Narrator confidently asserts man's supremacy, declaring to his wife that the Martians will be easily defeated; but as he later reflects, "So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of the shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. 'We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.'" And when mankind is in its darkest hour, the Narrator touches "an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt... a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no long longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away." And when it is all over, the Narrator concludes that, "Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity - pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion." These were not comfortable thoughts to confront the late- nineteenth century mindset with. As Charles Darwin wrote, "Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."
The biological arrogance of man was a concern that stayed with Wells for the rest of his life. In 1942 he referred to humanity as "the species we so prematurely call Homo sapiens," and in 1944, two years before his death, wrote: "We are learning biological modesty very reluctantly. We make Man the measure of our universe, and the same sort of self-satisfaction that dubbed our sort Homo sapiens, and his biological kindred Primate, blinds us to the many alternative cards our hard and vindictive mother Nature may have up her sleeve for us... Forms may be arising whose weapon will be mortal human epidemics to which they are immune... Only the hard-thinking man with the microscope, working without haste and without delay, can hope to anticipate and avert that attack upon mankind." In other words, by 1944 Wells could envisage the fate that eventually befalls the Martians befalling humanity. There is a simple but brilliant poetry in the Martians succumbing to the 'lowest' form of life - the bacteria: even these great lords of the universe, greater even than man, are struck down by the apparently most insignificant and microscopic organisms. However, it may not be as wholly original as one might suppose: in Percy Greg's Across the Zodiac one of his many wives dies of an Earthly disease against which she has no resistance. (Incidentally, though The War of the Worlds makes no mention of viruses - 'lowlier' even than bacteria, they had been first identified in 1892 with the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus - so their role as an agent of disease was understood if not fully appreciated.)
The bacterial fate of the Martians also provides another lesson from Wells in the process of natural selection. The first clue to the Martian's imminent demise is given in the fate of the "red weed" - a Martian plant introduced by the invaders: "In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due... to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases - they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead." And eventually, the Martians are all killed, "slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared... These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things - taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many - those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance - our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars.... By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vein." In other words, Wells is saying that for all our failings, man has evolved to fit his 'chosen' environment.
It is interesting to note that whilst recognised as an agent of natural selection at the end of the nineteenth century, the full importance of viruses, bacteria and other microbes in the process of evolution has only more recently become fully apparent. As micro- organisms have a much shorter life-cycle than their host organisms, their rate of evolution is faster, and it is a constant struggle for the host organisms to 'keep up' in this evolutionary arms race. This has been dubbed the 'Red Queen effect', named after Lewis Carroll's Queen in Through the Looking Glass: "Now, here, you see," says the Queen, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." This effect is seen as particularly instrumental in encouraging the evolution of sexual reproduction in host animals. Very basically (for a more detailed discussion see Further Reading), sexual reproduction 'jumbles up' the genes and thus the immune systems of each generation. This gives the new offspring an in-built advantage over the micro-organisms that have been busy evolving to attack the parental generation. Animals that reproduce without sex are therefore often susceptible to these micro-organisms: they have no natural variation of immune systems between individuals or generations, and if one is susceptible, in theory they all are. So it would seem unsurprising that the Martians are, "absolutely without sex... A young Martian... was really born upon earth... and it was found attached to its parents, partially budded off, just as young lily-bulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the fresh- water polyp." The point Wells makes with regard to this is that it leaves them "without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from the differences among men", thus stressing his idea of super-rational Martian intelligence. However, intentionally or not, Wells has stumbled across one of the reasons why the Martians all succumbed so quickly to the bacteria: they are, effectively, all clones of one another - with identical immune systems.
Wells also notes that on earth "Among the lower animals... the two processes occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the case." And this is only likely to be the case in a micro-organism free environment. It would have to have been so for a considerable length of time for the Martians to make such an oversight as to ignore the concept of space quarantine that human astronauts now routinely practise. Indeed "in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of their dead. And the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the putrefaction process." And in a twenty-first century twist on a nineteenth century conjecture, scientists are now speculating that there may be bacteria to be found on Mars. Traces of them may or may not have already been found in Mars rock, depending on which expert one chooses to believe, but if they are there, humanity may well not have evolved natural resistance to them should they turn out to be harmful...