In Thrall To The Red Planet

Eric Rabkin argues that depictions of Mars in literature and film – both as the cradle of hideous invaders, and humanity’s potential saviour – frequently reflect the political climate back on Earth

ALIEN INVASION

HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds arrived in a period in which wars of empire raged across the globe

Introducing the world to hideous, tentacled Martians – who lay waste to mankind with devastating heat-ray guns – it’s hardly surprising that HG Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds made quite an impact when it was published in hardback in 1898.

The novel tapped into a climate of global anxiety, as the world’s imperial powers continued to flex their muscles but encountered increasingly determined opposition as they did so. The Cuban War of Independence, the Philippine Revolution and the Spanish-American War were just three of the conflicts to rage in the dying days of the 19th century.

The War of the Worlds was one in a long line of British invasion narratives – beginning with George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking in 1871, a fictional account of a German attack on Britain.

An invasion dominates Wells’s novel too. But, in this case, it’s not humans responsible for it. When Martian forces make a surprise crash-landing in southern England, British troops are helpless to stop their relentless and bloody advance. “With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world,” the novel’s narrator tells us. “Yet, across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.”

As Britain stood on the brink of a second conflict with the Boers of southern Africa, and with tensions rising that would end in the First World War, it was but a small step to substitute Martian invaders

THE RISE OF THE RED MENACE

Amid anti-communist witch-hunts, films and novels offered contrasting portrayals of Mars