No-one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that this world was being watched...

I entirely forgot to write a post last week. Sorry. I have no excuses, I had nothing to do all day but I still failed. No matter...

Firtsly, I would like to pick up on a point Rachael made on Friday about time periods and the end of 'Ancient History.' I had a great lecture last week about Periodization, chopping the past up into manageable chunks, it is essential for the study of history, but nearly impossible to do right, because it's not a natural way to divide History. I currently study three periods of history which by rights shouldn't overlap, but if you take ancient Rome and say (for example) it ends in the 5th Century AD, you're already well into the medieval period, and when does this end? With a sudden surge of technological advancement in the 13th Century? Somewhere along this line it blurs into Early modern period, the end of which is a source of great controversy - is it in 1517 when Martin Luther pins his theses to a church door in Germany, or the 1790s during the French Revolution - That's a 200 year disagreement that makes History a bugger to study. But it has to be done. If you can't devide History into the such called Frameworks (Periodization, history of individual nations, history of individual people...) you have to write about everything. And that would be impossible. Paradoxically, by limiting your studies using a framework, you unavoidably add severe bias to your work and cut off potentially argument changing facts. Historians are fighting a constant battle they can never win!

Couldn't resist adding it in

(Basically, people who tell you History is a soft subject have never studied it. And you should supply is cookies when you see us because we are often found lying in piles of books in confusion and exhaustion)

On the other hand, linking to the theme, to me studying history is living the dream. Because I want to be a historian? No. Because I want nothing more than to get in the TARDIS and fly away to travel in time. Studying history is about as close as the average girl can get to doing so, I want to be prepared for when we invent time travel. Of course they wouldn't send scientists back into the past, that would be stupid, they'll send the people who know what they're doing. The same way they didn't get engineers to fly airoplanes in the early days, they got the Navy, because they knew how to navigate big metal boxes.
On the subject of Time Machines....

This week I am going to talk about The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. It's a classic, has been transformed into almost every medium available. Possibly most famously on the Radio; more recently in a musical by Jeff Wayne (You know the one - 'The chances of anything coming from Mars, are a million to one, he said... But still, they come!!) and firstly as a news bulletin style Drama that was so realistic there were reports of mass hysteria throughout America as people believed the Martians were actually invading. Later the American public and it's suggestibility, not Welles and his convincing performance, was blamed as the cause. Definitely one of my favorite true stories about the 20th Century.

To summarise the story, the Martians invade, build a huge metal army, cause destruction, cause the renouncement of faith, separate families, drive people to insanity (My poor artilleryman...) and all the author wants to do is to find his wife and be safe. For most of the book it's your typical post-apocalyptic science fiction technology-dooms-us-all Victorian epic, one of the first of it's kind in describing conflict between men and extraterrestrials. Graphic description, a variety of characters from different settings tell the story brilliantly, since we hear of the unnamed author's experience of the invasion from his small rural village, it is destroyed, but the majority escape shaken, but unharmed, following the road away, and we also see it from his brother's POV in the middle of London where he is a student, the utter chaos caused in an industrial area, the huge loss of life and the last hope of mankind as some of them (including the mysterious 'Carrie', whose relation to the narrator we don't know) escape on a steamer under protection of the battleship 'Thunderchild'. This protection is quickly melted by the martians, and the humans despair.

"What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?"

Shockingly for a novel, the lack of characterisation is key. It's very personal, involving the reader by telling a first person narrative but main characters are not named, only adding to the fact that they are not important, they are just another person fighting to survive against the martian invasion, wallowing in dispair and mourning their loved ones. There's a particularly thrilling part where he has to kill a curate, who has gone insane, to stop the martians finding them through his shouting. He feels guilty, bu realises overall that he did what he had to, the martians had pulled apart a civilized society and humanity was reduced to a scrawling rat-like state, the artilleryman trying to dig underground and people fighting to the death over scraps of food. They are vermin compared to the elegant, powerful martians.

I loved reading this book, but there is one thing I will never quite get over. And that is that the end of this book is possibly THE BIGGEST ANTICLIMAX in literary history.
After so much chaos and horror and death and hunger the narrator is finally driven to death. He chooses to give himself up to the martians, the reader is geared up for a graphic, heroic ending but it never comes. Because, without warning, the martians just... die. Just before the final chapter the Martians are killed off by bacteria;

"These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning... But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many... [we are] altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain."

Clearly it is a very metaphorical ending, in this Victorian post-industrial age there was widespread terror of the dangers of science, apparent in almost every sci-fi novel of the 20th century (Frankenstein, for example). Bacteria kills the martians where man had failed (Though the ultimate victory is still attributed to man, since Britain was a prospering, ruling nation it would be awful to suggest we might lose a war...) But the suddenness of it shocks the reader as much as it does the narrator - this is all in the final chapter alone - and we are rewarded by a heartwarming reunite with his wife and brother and a threat that the Martians might return, not in the narrators future but maybe in the readers future. *Shiver*. It's not quite what we thought the novel was building up to, but there we are. One science defeating another. That's a new one for Victorian literature.

It's a very good book, I recommend it. I also recommend the radio musical by Jeff Wayne. I don't so much recommend the film starring Tom Cruise and annoying whiny child Dakota Fanning, though I liked it as a kid.
Emily.