The End of the World is an apocalyptic myth that first becomes prominent in religious speculation in the period of Late Antiquity. St. John’s Apocalypse, included as the last book of the New Testament, is the best-known item in the genre, with its elaborate visions of Armageddon and the Last Judgment. Persistently, however, since the French Revolution, the myth of the End of the World has secularized itself, expressing its eschatological anxiety in terms of entirely this-worldly events. In the Twentieth Century, the End of the World became a staple of “scientific romance” or science fiction, where it often concerned the perfection of destructive instrumentality. In England beginning in the 1870s, the foreign invasion story became popular. In
George Tomkyns Chesney’s many times reprinted
Battle of Dorking (1871), Kaiser Wilhelm I, not content with the defeat of France at Sedan, pushes on through Belgium and the Netherlands, crosses the Channel, and reduces Britain to vassalage. Sometimes the invasion involved the so-called Yellow Peril, an onslaught, in some non-specific near future, by militarized hordes of Chinese or Japanese, who overwhelm Europe.
The End of the World typically presents itself in a literalist manner, with the physical obliteration of the globe and humanity. The antecedents in this case go as far back as the first half of the Nineteenth Century, especially to the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849). Best known as the inventor of the detective story, Poe also established the broad outlines the science fiction story. Poe’s “
Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), the earliest tale of a cosmic collision that destroys humanity, climaxes in a planetary conflagration when, the chemistry of the comet’s tail having removed all nitrogen from earth’s airy mixture, the remaining oxygen-rich atmosphere induces all organic matter to burst into flame. Astronomer and science journalist
Camille Flammarion (1842 – 1925) expanded on Poe’s innovation in his novel
Le fin du monde (1893) where once again a cosmic interloper brings death to the earth, destroying it in a direct collision. Abel Gance
loosely adapted Flammarion’s novel to the silver screen in 1931. Both Poe’s short story and Flammarion’s novel include descriptions of future, decadent civilizations, in thrall to which much of
human nature has already gone extinct even before the physical cataclysm occurs.
The greatest interest of the End of the World in fiction comes, in fact, not from the cosmic, but rather from the sociological, political, and civilizational variants of the trope. A world-obliterating impact leaves no survivors and ceases to be pathetic in the instant when it occurs; but social, political, and civilizational catastrophes reserve a few survivors, who attest to their experience and add, perhaps, to humanity’s small store of wisdom. None was better at this type of End-of-the-World story than Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946). He made an early success of such a tale in
The Time Machine (1895) and his very last book,
The Mind at the End of its Tether(1946), is the oddest and most disturbing End-of-the-World story of all, except that Wells insists that it is the not a story but the apocalyptic truth.
I. Wells wrote two planetary collision stories, borrowing the idea from Poe’s “Conversation.” These are
“The Star”(1897) and
In the Days of the Comet (1906). In “The Star” – where Wells achieves an impartial, objectively analytical tone that he would refine in his novel-length catastrophe stories – the real disaster is human complacency, as it would be again in many of the same author’s “scientific romances.” Even in the civilized nations, Wells asserts, people rarely develop their awareness beyond the demands of routine and immediacy; while petty worries eat up its quotient of starveling intelligence, the typical modern mind altogether lacks a cosmic sense. When the astronomer Ogilvy calls attention to a “retardation” in the orbital velocity of the eighth planet, “such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of Neptune, nor… did the subsequent discovery of a faint, remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement.” Even after the interloper, in colliding with Neptune, becomes visible in daylight, effulgent and growing, the putatively educated regard the phenomenon blandly as a stellar novelty without implication for their lives. The most backward and superstitious people, by contrast, invest the “fiery signs” with due portentousness. In Europe and America only the perspicacious few grasp the likelihood that, “Man has lived in vain.” Otherwise, as Wells writes, “shops... opened and closed at the proper hours” and “use and wont still ruled the world.”
The celestial body’s inevitable near-encounter with Earth solicits the full range of cataclysm in massive
tsunamis, conflagration of the atmosphere, deluge, and seismic tremor, all of which leave a small stunned nucleus of survivors huddling in the wreckage. Wells hints at “a new brotherhood,” emerging from the shock and ruin of an altered geography, which organizes “the saving of laws and books and machines.” This too would become a standard Wellsian trope. “The Star” ends with a sudden, unexpected shift of perspective. Martian astronomers assess the event as “astonishing” in consideration of “what little damage the earth… has sustained.” “The Star” tells objectively of a catastrophe cosmic on the one hand and intellectual on the other. The intellectual debacle interests Wells more than the cosmic one. The Wellsian brand of Darwinism focuses much less on physiological than it does on psychological, ethical, and technical adaptation, as narrowly biological as Wells could nevertheless sometimes be. Stultified minds fail to grasp either the scale or the peril of universal forces.
The magnificent opening paragraph of
The War of the Worlds (1897) enjoys notoriety – from its partial rehearsal in the several, filmed versions of the scenario – to the extent that commenting on it strikes the writer as presumptive. Nevertheless, the same opening paragraph develops motifs from “The Star,” particularly “use and wont,” in such a way as to invite a renewal of consideration. Logicians urge that argument from analogy offends against forensic procedure, but Wells would have it that the main ingredient of complacency, which he again condemns, is the failure to consider analogies. The whole of Wells’ paragraph operates analogically. Wells invokes “intelligences greater than man’s,” mentalities “vast, cool and unsympathetic,” by which men have been “scrutinized and studied almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” That men “with infinite complacency” felt “assurance” in what Wells calls “their empire over matter,” belongs, as the narrator says, to the class of “mental habits… of departed days.”
From the history of the European empires
The War’s discourse draws in various items of unavoidable pertinence. The narrator, writing from a vantage point six years after the Martian attempt, details the onslaught’s effects in Britain, but far from wringing his hands in resentful anger he seems actually to mitigate the enemy’s blameworthiness: “Before we judge [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races.” The Tasmanians come under discussion, who, “in spite of their human likeness, were swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.” Mars being a world “far gone in its cooling” while the earth “is still teaming with life,” and life being everywhere “an incessant struggle for existence,” the Martians acted logically to avoid “the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them.” The failure of the Martian attempt to wrest earth and its resources prompts the invaders to turn their attention elsewhere. “Lessing has advanced excellent reasons,” writes the narrator in the Epilogue, “for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on Venus.”
The main interest for most readers in
The War of the Worlds consists in Wells’ vivid descriptions of mechanized warfare between a British military that fights with the armaments of the Boer and Spanish-American Wars and an attacking force whose weaponry marks a quantum leap in applied science. The “heat ray” anticipates the beam weapons that modern armories still have not perfected, while the “black smoke” uncannily prefigures the poison gas that belligerents would unleash during the trench-warfare of 1914-1918. The Martians dominate the battlefield. Occasionally, a crack British gun crew or an astute dreadnaught commander scores a tactical victory. The fragility of the British social fabric, however, almost as much as Martian technical superiority, supplies the invader with his most effective instrument of war. Once the Martians emerge from their initial “pit” at Horsell Common near Woking, Surrey, panic spreads infectiously. “The most extraordinary thing to my mind,” writes the narrator, “was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that order headlong.”
Information becomes a casualty. The sudden paucity of news, disrupting
use and wont, in turn exacerbates the rising hysteria, which in its own turn propels the disintegration of social order. In London, with trains gone missing and the railway timetables now useless, a great exodus on foot begins, which quickly degenerates into mob-behavior and lawlessness. The narrator’s brother, a medical student in London, witnesses the rapid descent into chaos. He records “a roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world… the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult around the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward.” In the company of two fleeing women, the brother resorts to a revolver to fight off criminal opportunists. Near the suburb of Edgeware, “the main road was a boiling stream of people”; a bit farther, they encounter “a whole population in movement,” whose constituents wear “fear and pain on their faces.” Martian vulnerability to terrestrial infections stops the attack, a kind of secular Providence.
In the Epilogue, the narrator remarks, “Whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events,” which “have robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence.” Wells is once again playing with analogies. Self-absorption and unfounded certainty prevented humanity from foreseeing the Martian attack; self-absorption and unfounded certainty prevented the Martians from foreseeing their sanitary incompatibility with the earth’s bacterial environment. Humanity found lucky redemption from the mentality of
use and wont – of
complacency – that made it prey to the Martians in the
Martian complacency that prevented the invaders from imagining untoward conditions on a new world.
II. A good academic parlor game would be to pose the question, what English-language novel of the first quarter of the Twentieth Century innovatively takes its plot from Homer’s
Odyssey while updating the action in a modern setting? Or one might ask, also of the professoriate during cocktail hour, what thinker first articulated the principle of
escalation, usually attributed to
Herman Kahn, and who,
before 1910, described an aerial terror-attack on New York City? The bafflement of the literature and political science faculties would likely be complete because today almost no one reads one of the most popular British writers of the first half of the just-completed century. These questions implicate Wells’ prophetic vision of global strategic conflict,
The War in the Air (1906). Whereas in
The War of the Worlds, the hostile agency, actually inhuman, arrives on earth from another planet, in
The War in the Air, dear old humanity rises to the role of its own devil. In particular, haphazard adoptions of new technology put unforeseen strains on social, political, and economic arrangements that reflect the folkways of an earlier age. Old habits, stubbornly maintained, prove inadequate to developing circumstances until a type of cultural schizophrenia occurs.
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” as a noteworthy Irish poet with a prophetic turn of mind would later write. Wells was quite as vatic and clairvoyant as any poet.
The first sentence of
The War in the Air is, “This here progress… it keeps on.” Tom Smallways, the protagonist’s elder brother, mutters the thought, a bit of non-committal, vaguely skeptical commentary from a bewildered soul representing a vestige of feudal mentality that has not, and perhaps cannot, keep up with changes in the mode of life. Bert Smallways, Wells’ working-class substitute for a Homeric hero, grasps his brother’s limitation dimly.
So much for innocent until proven guilty. So much for
limited government. What Americans are now facing is quite literally the end of
the line. We will either uphold the freedoms baked into our Constitutional
Republic, or we will scrap the entire project in the name of security as we
wage, endlessly, this futile, costly, and ultimately self-defeating War on
Terror.
But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military
detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing,
because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but
in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan
authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are
included in the grant of detention authority.”
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