Some critically important scholarship on the Martian Invasion.

You will be shocked to hear that H.G. Wells did not actually give a good date for the Invasion, but this line of speculation seems sound. It all comes down to basic astronomy and when certain church renovations took place. As usual – and yes, I’m going to make you click through. Ken Hite did the scholarship; he should get the clicks for it.

Interestingly: if you had asked me when the Martian Invasion took place I would have said “1938.” Well, more accurately I would have said “193…8? 1939? Whenever the radio program was… wait, sorry, you mean the original one? I dunno, some time in the 1890s?” It’s really interesting, the way that this particular intellectual property operates. I’ve read the original book more times than I’ve listened to the radio show, but the radio show is what I associate with the concept. And yet the visual image that I get when thinking of “War of the Worlds” is unambiguously from the 1950s flick*.  Guess this demonstrates the power the IP had on popular culture, eh?

Moe Lane

*I actually didn’t mind the Tom Cruise remake, but it was no first-season War of the Worlds TV series. Then again, what was?

2 thoughts on “Some critically important scholarship on the Martian Invasion.”

  1. Never much thought of the actual year in the book, just that it was early in the 20th Century and the weapons were turn of the century, so I always held it to be the first decade.

  2. Did you ever read the unauthorized sequel, Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss? It’s available at Project Gutenberg.
     
    Not quite in the same league as Wells’ novel, but noteworthy nonetheless. According to Wikipedia: …

    Serviss’ first attempt at fiction, the book was published serially in the New York Journal. Serviss went on to write other science fiction stories, arguably making him the first American to write science fiction professionally. An early example of what would later be called space opera, Edison’s Conquest of Mars was also a particularly literal “Edisonade”. The book contains some notable “firsts” in science fiction: alien abductions, spacesuits (called “air-tight suits”: see Spacesuits in fiction), aliens building the Pyramids, space battles, oxygen pills, asteroid mining, and disintegrator rays.

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