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Study 096 - The War of the Worlds - Part 4 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-06-27 14:00:13
Imported:
2024-06
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Behold! Man has come back into his own on the final episode of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells!

Please support our excellent reader: Greig Johnson!

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Comments

Apollo Sitting Up

You know he killed that artillery man after he got his first taste of curate blood! Just had the sense this time not to disclose it to his audience. (All joking aside would make for interesting fan fiction, a serial killer on the loose during this ordeal). Love this show! Had to jump on Patreon in fomo! Great job as always.-Apollo

Dave Machin

I’m assuming Jeff Wayne’s version of this will be discussed. Especially with all the OoooLaaa discussion.

Pam Winkler

They probably took the food for the humans, so they can keep them alive until they eat them.

Jerome Tracy

I really enjoyed your episodes on this classic. If you haven't already done them (I don't think you have, but...) please consider reviewing some of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger short stories - The Poison Belt, The Day the Earth Screamed, The Disintegration Machine, and The Land of Mists - in the future. In addition, The Lost World would warrant the multi-episode treatment as well. Thanks again, your shows are great!

Mark Simmons

In the unlikely event that I'm the first person to mention this in the history of the podcast... On the subject of genetic compatibility between Martians and Earthlings, there's actually a fringe theory that the building blocks of terrestrial life came from outer space, for example by hitchhiking on chunks of rock ejected from meteor impacts on the Martian surface. This theory is known, I kid you not, as "panspermia." I hope some day one of us will be able to use that in a pub quiz.

Jim Cannon

It is interesting to me that there are no proper names. Everyone is identified by role or profession; "wife," "brother," "curate," "artillary man." The narrator is literally positioned as an everyman. It makes the whole experience more universal, that these victims are archetypes, easy to empathize with or imagine as one's self or one's loved ones. That Herbert George was such a clever fellow.

Corey Wittig

Chad, not sure if you know but Manly Wade Wellman and his son Wade Wellman (not manly I guess) cowrote a book called Sherlock Holmes: The War of the Worlds. I have it but admit I haven’t read it.

KateSherrod

Everybody loves to fan-cast these stories with Muppets but I think Chad is onto something with this Looney Tunes thing. Our narrator can be Bugs, the Curate is Porky Pig, the Brother is Daffy, Marvin is the Martians of course. The Artilleryman is Wile E. Coyote... eh?

Ben Gilbert

Stephen Baxter’s authorized sequel takes up the idea that this was just the first wave of the invasion. Manly Wade Wellman with his father wrote a Holmes pastiche “Sherlock Holmes’ War of the World.” It was good but there was one particular descision by Wellman that pissed me off.

Avlin Starfall

I am basing this entirely on what Chris said about the amino acids not being compatible. If I'm understanding correctly, Chris said that imbibing something with a different amino acid chain would mean you would gain no nutrients from it. Then chris said the aliens were based off the same amino chain as us because they were drinking human blood. However, from the previous statement couldn't they still drink the human blood but would gain no nutrients from it if they were based on a different amino acid chain? Meaning they could basically starve to death even though they were consuming the blood and not really notice? I believe the general consensus is that humans starve in 3 weeks but couldn't the aliens starve faster because they are alien creatures and function far different from humans, especially because they subsistence entirely off liquid?

Professor Murder

It's rather prescient that the world that the Artillerist describes is just fascism. This desire to identify the portions of society that are causing it's downfall and excise them, implicitly with violence, along with eliminating cultural elements viewed as impractical and wasteful like the arts.

Matthew Heimbecker

There's a sequel to this book written by Garrett P Serviss called Edison's Conquest of Mars. It was commissioned by the Hearst newspaper chain to capitalize on the massive success of the serialised version of The War of the Worlds. In the sequel, Thomas Edison mounts a massive undertaking on behalf of the world's colonial powers to take revenge on the martians. They have a disintegrator ray and anti-gravity drives, created by Edison himself. It's a great read.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

While we've done no preparations for Martian attack, my family has supplies and occasional conversations about our plans for a large earthquake. Being unable to contact my wife for only six hours after the last major quake is what pushed us to get smart phones that would work even if the cell network was unavailable. It was a tremendous relief to learn that we were all fine. After a month of horror? I can't imagine.

Pagurus

Do I dare to fun-ruin the story of the mass panic supposedly caused by a radio broadcast of Wells's TWotW? Okay, as it turns out, it was more or less a complete invention by the newspapers in order to strike a blow against the radio in general, as they perceived it to be a dangerous rival for peoples' attention.

It's a Ghost.

Ooh la la! Thanks for another great month! Also, I used to have a hard time with H.G. Wells at times, but now I think I just took him too literally. Like, it’s hard for me to believe that Martians that are so technologically advanced to travel to Earth would be be walking around in tripods in England. Like why not use satellites with space guns first? And why England? Also, when the handling machine was making bars of aluminum out of clay, I was like, “I don’t believe it.” But now, especially after reading this book, I realize my hangup was probably just symbolism. The Martians landed in England because England was the most powerful country at the time. And they were walking around in tripods because tripods do seem like such an ungainly and very alien approach to an invasion. And yet they were still trampling all the little people, or perhaps I should say, they were still trampling all the little Englanders. Also, how could the handling machine make bars of aluminum out of clay, something so unbelievable? Well, because the Martians were so far ahead of us, despite their appearance and foreignness.

It's a Ghost.

Also, regarding servants, I was always confused for a moment when the upstairs people on Downton Abbey didn't seem to know the names of the downstairs people. Like, how do you not know who Daisy is?

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

Loving the idea of the wrestling giving them away. In particular, the idea that the actual sound that makes its way to the aliens’ ears is the loud reverberations of the spring-loaded floor of the pro-wrestling ring the narrator had constructed while the curate stood by and offered no help whatsoever.

Long time hater

Having never read War of the World's, I had no idea how heavily it influenced more modern dystopia works eg. 28 Days Later and Children of Men, regarding how environmental stress provokes devolving into fascist/proto-fascist sentiments of power, strength, human worth and the exclusion/subjugation of people as an act of exercising this perceived strength. The notion of diminishing women to 'breeding stock' in these stories is certainly more worrying than fast moving regular people...eating people or hyper intelligent squid monsters

Prince Prawn

It always amazes me when I read an author, or you guys cover one, and their prose just seems so timeless. Id say anachronistic, but that doesnt seem quite right. Certain authors just have an amazing ability to capture "being human" and write without the cultural trappings of their space and time. Of those you've covered I have gotten some real quality human jive time with Bierce, Matheson, Sturgeon, Vonnegut and now Wells. (Sturgeon and Bierce are worthy IMO of their own collection section). Keep up the yeomans work in bringing us our literary Aunts and Uncles from across the temporal abyss.

Allison Albright

I agree with Chris about the servant thing. The book seems so well thought out in terms of how an event like this might go down - I was thinking of real events that have happened in my lifetime and how true the story feels - except for the servant, who might as well be an appliance given how she's talked about in the book. Maybe it's just the Victorian view of things, but it feels very alien to me. This was so good in nearly every respect though, just an extremely well written story. Really glad you guys covered this one, it was a treat.

Joe Webb

"Draculas up all the burgundy" is a phrase I have to work into my daily routine. "Who draculaed up the milk?"

Drix

I last read this book in 6th grade, so coming back to it with adult eyes is pretty cool. One recurring element I found particularly interesting throughout the book are which animals other than humans are shown to survive, and potentially even thrive in the fallout of the invasion. Not surprisingly, all of these are also animals that have a symbiotic relationship with humans. Dogs, Cats, Rats, and Crows/Ravens/Vultures. All of them(except maybe cats) perfectly fit into the scavenger niche; all historically follow human armies to feed on the dead, or linger on the outskirts of civilization and eat whatever scraps that can be found. Remove the humans from the dominant position, and these species can still thrive; there's no real reason for the Martians to bother about crows eating the dead, or rats leftover human foods. An apocalypse for the humans turns into a field day for our symbiotic partners(although the dogs and cats might be sad..) It's also telling that the protagonist is frequently directly compared with a rat, a nice symbolic link to what would have been the new order of things if the Martians had succeeded. Tangentially, I feel I would be doing my English minor a disservice if I don't at least point out that the Coal Cellar portion of the book is a beat for beat match of the classic Descent into the Underworld trope of the Hero's Journey. Absolutely fantastic book, it left me with a lot to think about.

Sir Snoozelot

We must remember that without servants the amount of upper class gentlemen forced to go about their days 'Porky Pig style' could have surely brought about the collapse of Victorian society. Too busy with candle maintenence to fully dress, the great and the good trying to govern with their meat and two veg horribly exposed... the population could only dream of Martian overlords without visible genitalia!

Bret Kramer

We’re getting dangerously close to the podcast serving as a literary Rosetta Stone for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen… I think all we’re missing is 20,000 Leagues and King Solomon’s Mines (or maybe She)… And while I love the image of the crippled tripod on the hill ululating, now all I can think of is a different alien attack and a different Ulala. ;) https://youtu.be/b0A5smrzVaA?si=O7qLjK5nOq36z-Xr

Runninghead

Chris and Chad's different renditions of "ulla, ulla, ulla" had me literally crying strong tears of laughter! The Martian's cries are one of the trickier parts of the book to imagine while reading. To preserve the threatening atmosphere I settled on the interpretation that "ulla" is just meant to imply ululating, as with some Arabic cultures. Such a sound coming from the throat of these large, mainly head, alien creatures (part octopus, part gigantic tick!) would in reality be appropriately horrifying. Thank you for the wonderful coverage of this iconic tale. It was everything I'd hoped it would be.

Andrew Trnacek

If you want to know how terrifying Ulla can sound listen to Jeff Wayne’s prog rock opera of war of the worlds. In fact just listen to it it’s a masterpiece. Fun fact my school put on the first live performance of the musical in 1988!

Andrew Trnacek

It’s interesting HG Wells was an atheist but the narrator states that it was bacteria that god in his wisdom created that took out the Aliens. He gives this outcome a religious significance.

Jason Paul

Greig did a stellar job on these!