The War of the Worlds

In War of the Worlds by H.G Wells, Martians from the planet mars land on earth in silver

cylinders. The narrator being among some of the first people to reach the fields were the first

silver cylinder landed quickly was immersed with excitement. As human beings we regard

ourselves as being the most intelligent mammal on the planet, superior to all other creatures. In

much of the way we envision Martians being these intelligent creatures that in our minds would

resemble human traits because we are also superior creatures. But to the surprise of the narrator

and all the towns people the Martians were far from looking alike to humans.

The book shortly emphasizes the problem with the human race; we limit ourselves by

being anthropocentric. The fact that the narrator and towns people believed that the Martians

would have hands like humans shows how anthropocentric we are. They approached the

Martians cylinder with a white flag once they had realized that the Martians did not resemble us,

of course waving a white flag again points to something a human would know. They keep doing

things that would only be known by humans. And because humans are the most evolved

mammal on planet earth to them it would only make sense that a Martian would know what

human gestures meant. They completely are oblivious of the fact that a gesture known by

humans does not necessarily need to be known to be an intelligent alien.

The narrator first describes the Martians as “they were, I now saw the most unearthly

creatures it is possible to conceive”. But after observing them closer for a period of time he sees

why the Martians are how they are. Instead of hands the narrators describes the Martians having

tentacles and not having a body but were merely heads. The narrator saw that although they were

superior to humans they lacked intelligence of what they were actually doing. They were these
superior creatures that like us were hurting humans. He sees that we are not so different from the

Martians and compares it to the colonization of Cortez, this superior race among the Indians.

And like the aliens we wiped out a race we believed to be below us. The aliens had come to

show us that we weren’t above them.

“Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence,

without any of the emotional substratum of the human being”. The most important thought of the

narrator. Of course they do not have these human like features because they are increasingly

intelligent at the sacrifice of their body. He attributes having a body with having emotions, thus

the narrator understands the ethical reason behind their destruction and killing. They are higher

in the evolution scale, but with higher evolution they were striped of emotions. The narrator

throughout the rest of the book begins to see how the evolution of their bodies affects their

ethical decisions towards human beings. Being superior to the human race for the aliens meant

sacrificing what we can’t possibly do without, our emotions.