H.G. Wells Response Paper:
The Time Machine vs. The War Of The Worlds
Copyright 2000 by Bridget Kelly
The thing about science fiction that has always entranced me, though I suppose that in part this is true about anything well-written (and in referring to science fiction I mean really good science fiction, the powerful stuff) has been its tremendous power to seize hold of my imagination and instil in me a terrible fear that it just might be true, or a chilling thrill of sympathy with whatever situation has been described. It is the power of the reactions rather than the actual emotion engendered that entrances me.
These two books by H.G. Wells produced the intended reaction in me, particularly the War of the Worlds, which I found chilling and in the end quite moving. Part of this is possibly that I read it all at one sitting very late at night with hardcore punk too loud on my headphones in a cold room in that peculiar state of suspended stealth occasioned by a sleeping roommate with an early alarm clock and a fragile disposition. But I certainly found it more effective than the Time Machine. War of the Worlds had more immediate and desperate conflict within it; the Time Machine's violence and conflict seemed remoter and at times too strange to be really comprehensible.
In the Time Machine, the alien creatures, future humans, are unknowable through their shallowness and frivolity; Weena in particular is intimately known by the narrator and yet little character comes through. An odd point to make is that except for the chillingly vivid catalogue of place-names in War of the Worlds, Weena is the only proper name that appears in either of these books. In the Time Machine, people are given epithets, and these are capitalized- the Time Traveller, the Medical Man, the Editor- but in War of the Worlds the quasi-names remain merely descriptive nouns- my wife, the curate, my brother, the artilleryman. Regardless of a character's closeness to the narrator or importance to the story, there is no change in the noun used to refer to him or her.
But getting back to the Martians (the only characters with capitalized names in the story, though as it's a place name it would have to be capitalized anyhow; only the geographical names are proper and specific), in the War of the Worlds these aliens remain fundamentally unknowable. There is no communication of any sort with them. The only time a Martian's speech of any sort is recorded by the narrator is the haunting end scene of the deserted London with the dying Martian's unending monotonous ulla, ulla, ulla. In the Time Machine the Eloi are reported as speaking, but not communicating any important ideas, and none of their actual words are reported.
There were other details that were strikingly similar between the two books. In both there was an undertone of cannibalism; in the Time Machine the horrible relationship between the Morlocks and the Eloi was made plain. In the War of the Worlds the cannibalism is more speculative; humans are certainly eaten, and the relationship is more parasitic than cannibalistic, but in the narrator's speculation upon the evolution of Martians and their similarity to human behavior there is a faint sense of horrified identification with them.
Another interesting common link is the idea of a race of people being driven underground to survive, an underclass attaining mastery over the above-ground class eventually. Of course it doesn't reach that point in the War of the Worlds, but the suggestion is made. In both books the narration is first-person; this gives the story an increased sense of credibility. The narrator in both is similar: a man of learning, gifted with the ability to reason, to understand a new situation, to adapt, to observe and endeavor to understand the initially unfathomable and impossible situations and beings that continuously alter his life in the most drastic ways.
There are differences between them; the narrator of War of the Worlds has a certain desperation, helplessness, lack of conceit, and this is accentuated by the fact that he is throughout the book continuously struggling to survive, to continue to find meaning in his life, to understand what is happening to him. The protagonist of the Time Machine by comparison is less easy to sympathize with, portrayed as he is as a man too clever to be trusted, ultimately an idle dabbler in forces beyond his control. Perhaps that's just my personal reaction, but there is something in his tale that leaves me uneasy, a sense that his inability to understand the consequences of his actions does not make him undeserving of his uncertain fate.
In both books there is an occasional sense of detachment; in the Time Machine this is more true partly because the narrator is quoting the Time Traveler's story for most of the tale, and partly because the story is related as a tale told after the fact. And partly it suffers in comparison to the raw immediacy of the War of the Worlds. This narrative is detached as well but there is a sense of shock, a sense of credibility in the man's reactions to the situation that confronts him, that makes the tale more riveting and more moving. There is something more contrived about the Time Machine, more of a feeling that the story might have been concocted just for its intrinsic interest, as much of the speculative fiction genre can be classified. But the War of the Worlds succeeds in that it seems so credible a tale; it is being told for obvious reasons. It is an epic tale of humankind being put through some sort of ultimate test. Time Machine remains a solitary adventure with ultimately little effect on the rest of humanity.