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The Problem with AlienInvasions
By Sally Morem
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth centurythat this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinisethe transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Withinfinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their littleaffairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possiblethat the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave athought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of thosedeparted days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other menupon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome amissionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and  surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth centurycame the great disillusionment.” 
This is how Herbert George Wells began his magnum opus of 1898,
TheWar of the Worlds
. His novel is set in a specific time and place, England inthe early 20
th
century, the near future for Wells and his contemporaries.Wells wields his novel as an ideological weapon pointed against humanecological hubris and English imperialism, as well as an entertainment; awar story (albeit, a very odd war story told decades before the emerginggenre of science fiction even had that name). He justifies the alien invasion(if that’s the right verb) by explaining that Mars had been undergoingcatastrophic climate change for some time. Mars was dying, and so too, of course, were the Martians.
 
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely amystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the middaytemperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is muchmore attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but athird of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones.That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, hasbecome a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers,and hardened their hearts.
We humans have had a considerable amount of unnerving experience withinvaders seeking to escape such catastrophes, even though not on a globalscale. The herding peoples riding their horses on the Eurasian plains seemedto be hell-bent from time to time on attacking the great civilizations of China, the Middle East, and Europe. At that time, no one knew what drovethem. Now, with the careful study of such things as tree rings and coresamples, we scan the history of the waxing and waning of grasses and herdsin response to global, or at least, regional warming and cooling. Generallyspeaking, warming brought bounty and cooling brought disaster in the formsof famine and plague. We now have very strong evidence that such adisastrous cooling took place as the Roman Empire crumbled.As scientifically minded people in turn-of-the-century England becameaware of such fluctuations, the once inexplicable acts of such people as theMongols became quite understandable, if not acceptable in polite society.And so, the Victorians understood Wells’ story. The desperation of “thenatives” made perfect sense. The Martians invade Earth because they wantto survive.
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing  subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
 
Wells was a good enough writer and thinker to know that an invasion fromMars would have to be made by a people far superior to us in the sciencesand technology. An invasion of desperate herders simply would not do.Wells name-drops Schiaparelli in his prologue. He was the real-life 19
th
century astronomer who introduced the notion of “canali” being visible onthe surface of Mars. Percival Lowell mistranslated “canali” (channels) into“canals,” and insisted that he did indeed see canals on Mars through histelescope. The imagination of the novelist turned the imagination of theastronomers into a story so potent that radio show director Orson Welles wasable to use a slightly updated and Americanized version of the story to scaremillions of people into really believing the Martians up to no good inGrover’s Mill in 1938.Unfortunately, for subsequent editions of the story, such as the 1988 TVseries (a sequel to George Pal’s 1953 movie) and Spielberg’s 2005 movie,the story doesn’t bear close scrutiny. For one thing, American space probes,such as Mariner and Viking, proved that there could never have been canals,Martians, or a vast, dying civilization on that benighted planet. The Martianatmosphere turned out to be so thin that it was impossible to imagineanything other than very tough bacteria surviving below the surface there.Our space probes destroyed what was left of the plausibility of every sciencefiction story ever written featuring Martians—not just
The War of theWorlds
. And they didn’t even have to zap anyone to do so.This is why Spielberg transformed his aliens from Martians to invaders froman unnamed star system. This is also why Spielberg used a heavily editedversion of Well’s prologue at the beginning of the movie, eliminating allmention of the 19
th
century, Mars and Martians. Unfortunately, thistransformation undermined the little that remained of the story’sfundamental structural soundness by removing the very reason we feared theinvaders in the first place—we, the readers, listeners, viewers, of the various permutations of 
The War of the Worlds
knew that the Martians were out totake what was ours because they desperately needed it. We knew that theywould do anything, anything at all to take Earth and kill us all. But as far asSpielberg’s aliens are concerned…well, we have no idea what they’re reallytrying to accomplish, except that they’re clearly evil. Boo! Hiss!Tom Cruise plays a divorced dad in the movie who runs for his life as atripod erupts out from under the sidewalks of New York and zaps people
of 00

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efinley

I hate that I'm posting this where Kathleen can see it, but this was a very insightful and entertaining essay. Aliens need motives too ...

reply09 / 08 / 2009
Tammy Nam

and i found some ... interesting... related documents when i went to this page. viva scribd community!

09 / 09 / 2009
kathleen

i'm glad you made your love for this document public.

09 / 08 / 2009
akhilles85

Very well put together.

reply07 / 16 / 2009
Sally Morem

Thanks, Rania, for your very kind comments. Please feel free to read any of my other essays here.

reply02 / 12 / 2009
te ariki

Well written, well presented. An absolute joy to read! This author puts forth her case with clarity and humor that I find refreshing. Well done, and please write some more! Bless you. Ra.

reply02 / 11 / 2009
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