...which you may or may not be aware of.
1. H. G. Wells introduced his version of the Martians in an earlier story called "
The Crystal Egg." Whether he had intended specifically at that time for the Martians to become invaders in
The War of the Worlds is not entirely known; certainly, this story did not directly foreshadow the invasion. The titular "crystal egg" was used by the Martians (along with a number of other unknown "eggs") as spying devices. Each egg was linked to an identical one on Mars, and in the right lighting, certain individuals could see Mars in the egg. (It was a rather Lovecraftian story, actually.) The same year, Wells also published "
The Star," which offhandedly mentioned that Martian astronomers had witnessed the events of the story (namely, the formation of a new star and its near collision with Earth, followed by this star plunging into the Sun).
2. The Martians' tripods were
probably made primarily out of an aluminum alloy, based on the fact that the Martians were busy refining it out of local clay in one of their bases. Certainly, they made heavy use of the stuff. The fact that they could effortlessly refine it out of common clay is one of the few areas where Wells' Martians still far surpass us.
3. Mars is a dead world, but it may be considerably "less dead" than one would think. Note that I take the following statement with a grain of salt, but it's a highly interesting possibility. Some self-appointed "Mars expert" believes that Mars may have harbored a living civilization as little as a few tens of thousands of years ago (give or take). Why? There is evidence that a large body of some kind may have come within Mars'
Roche limit and shattered, thus bombarding the world with thousands of meteoric bodies and utterly wiping out life on its surface. (The same guy suggests that three particularly large impacts linked with this event created
Olympus Mons and two other large extinct volcanoes on Mars' surface. Of course, Olympus Mons is supposed to be a really geologically ancient volcano...)
4.
The War of the Worlds is part of the period genre from Victorian/Edwardian Britain called
invasion literature. Britain was really worried at that time about some country slipping past the British Navy and invading the British Isles. While the British Army was an efficient force, it wasn't much taken seriously by the European powers;
Chancellor Bismarck is said to have remarked that, if the British Army landed for an assault on Germany, he would "send the police to deal with them." Europe's armies were far larger and more powerful than Britain's, and both sides knew it; thus, Europe dreamed of landings, while Britain had nightmares. The most notable novel of the genre other than
The War of the Worlds is probably
The Battle of Dorking, whose name I am not making up. It is thought that the main reason Wells had knowledge of then-modern military tactics and technology is because of familiarity with the rest of the genre.
5. It is not a coincidence that
Dracula was published only the year before. Imperial Britain was well aware of the fact that its position was rather precarious in the world, held in place only by the incomparable British Navy. The Navy was required to protect shipping from piracy by other nations, to keep order in the British dominions, and of course for self-defense. These things were the
lifeblood of the British Empire. Britain's fascination at this time with vampires-Dracula and the Martians-was because it was well aware that it was essentially
itself a vampire feeding off of its colonies.
6. As with the later "The Land Ironclads," Wells successfully predicted a future development in warfare; where in
TLI he predicted tanks, in
TWotW, he predicted the use of poison gas, which like the tank became a fixture of the Great War years later. He also predicted the use of "total war" tactics to some degree, although this may not have been as intentional.
7. Cannons would make incredibly impractical devices for launching objects into space for a huge variety of reasons, including difficulty in aiming over such distances and the amount of acceleration that would be required for such a launch being lethal to any living thing and strenuous on even the sturdiest of equipment.
8. Well, let's be frank-the ending of
TWotW was great in its day. But it's horribly dated, too. That bacteria would somehow fail to exist on Mars is absolutely preposterous, Martian science wiping them out or no. It's not so preposterous that their immune systems would have difficulties with Earth microbes, but if the Martians were truly so advanced, they would have been able to protect themselves
somehow. (This becomes even more ridiculous, really, in Spielberg's version, since those Martians are clearly as much above 21st century humans in terms of technology as Wells' Martians were above 19th century man.)
9. Many people describe the Martians as being "invincible" to the British forces; while they were close, they clearly fell short of this, as a well-placed artillery shell could kill one. (That was why they started using the Black Smoke, since the heat rays would have taken too long and possibly have been too expensive for killing all the artillery they might encounter.) This meant that the tripods were at a minor disadvantage in the water, as ships had more and better artillery and greater mobility than land forces; of course, they were even more vulnerable to the heat rays. A naval ship proved able to kill two Martian tripods, though, so the Martians would have had difficulty leaving Britain, had they not been building flying machines.
10. There was a sequel. But Wells didn't write it. More on that tomorrow.
-Signing off.
Marsh isn't very lucky, because he falls into a machine called the Gravitron 3000.
It's very easy to tell which fields do what, as they are color-coded and have arrows pointing in the direction of the exerted force (i.e.the direction you'll fall in).
...and also sideways.
Like Hello Worlds! and Enough Plumbers, That Gravity Game is a puzzle game at heart, and sometimes, it's quite clever.
And like those games, it can also be quite vicious.