Platypus of the Worlds

Next one down. My quest to read books I should have read by now but haven't continues. I've just finished H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," and begun "The Time Machine" and "The Invisible Man." I've always thought of the "War of the Worlds" as a simple horror novel (of course it wouldn't have remained popular for over a hundred years if it was just that, come to think of it!). The edition I've been reading is put together by Barnes and Noble and contains endnotes and commentary by Alfred Mac Adam. Mac Adam's notes alerted me from the get-go that there was a lot more to "War of the Worlds" than a summer blockbuster. Indeed, it's rather frightening. Well's lays out with grim enthusiasms a program for eugenics, race war, and the horrors of the twentieth century. As his character, the artillery man, expounds, all useless people ought to willingly shuffle off and die for the good of the race. The benefit to man in the Martians coming is that man may one day learn to be like them! Well's takes a dark, pessimistic, stoic satisfaction that only conflict and cataclysm can spur advancement (The greatest commandment in his Darwinian faith). If Wells has a saving grace (perhaps), it's that he lacks Marx's naivete and Nietzsche's perverse joy in the thought of uber-men smashing the planets to pieces for the sheer fun of it (see G. K. Chesterton's critique of Wells and Nietzsche in his works "Orthodoxy" and "The Everlasting Man."

Reading the novels that you were supposed to have read as an over-imaginative teenager has its advantages: while they may entertain at that level, there's ever so much more to be gotten out of them!