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H. G. Wells understood three key facts. Firstly, he knew that he was living in an age of unprecedented progress, commenting in 1902, "In the past century, there were more changes than in the previous thousand years. The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last." Secondly, he knew that this progress was likely to be able to make men fight more brutal wars than ever before, by the construction of more lethal machinery, leading him to predict the horrors of atomic weapons in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. And thirdly, he understood that, in spite of man's achievements, his nature had not changed, commenting, "There are satisfactory grounds for believing that man...is still mentally, morally and physically, what he was during the later Paleolithic period."

I wish therefore to discuss how Wells predicted and observed the technological development of man during the early twentieth century and how he contrasted it with man's mental stagnation. It was his belief that man had not evolved from his brutal ancestor that led him to criticise the flaws of the League of Nations and led him to coin the term "liberal fascism" in 1932, believing that, left to its own devices, mankind would destroy itself. He was staunchly opposed to any attempt to perfect man, which he saw as an impossible task, and concluded that man would always seek conflict, writing in 1905, "No Utopia will ever save him from the emotional drama of struggle." It was this view combined with his recognition that man's dominant position on Earth was not a permanent one that made Wells' non-fiction writings on war so compelling.

Biographical note

Ivan Wise is editor of The Shavian, journal of The Shaw Society. He appeared at last year's Hay on Wye festival for a recording of BBC Radio 4's Great Lives, discussing the life of Shaw, and was a Ronald Bryden scholar at the 2006 Shaw Festival in Canada. He has written on Shaw for the Times Higher Education Supplement and Guardian Unlimited and has given papers at conferences on Rudyard Kipling at the University of Kent, on Graham Greene in Berkhamsted and on Anthony Powell at the Wallace Collection in London.

This paper will examine the non-fiction and journalism of H.G. Wells at the start of the First Word War, particularly the series of newspaper articles published in late 1914 under the title "The War that will End War".

On the eve of war breaking out, H.G. Wells wrote an article in the national press which later in October 1914 he re-published with a series of other newspaper articles in a book entitled “The War That Will End War”. In this , Wells writes of the coming war as being “a war for peace” in which “every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war.” In his "Experiment in Autobiography" (1934) Wells discusses the circumstances in which the phrase “war to end war” was invented. Although Its tone is apologetic, Wells describes his own mood in 1914 as: “Intensely indignant at the militarist drive in Germany…..I shouted various newspaper articles of an extremely belligerent type…..The fount of sanguine exhortation in me swamped my warier disposition towards critical analysis and swept me along. I wrote a pamphlet, that weighed, I think, with some of those who were hesitating between participation and war resistance, The War that will end War. The title has become proverbial.”

The influence of the pamphlet is a moot point. This paper will seek to suggest why Wells thought that the coming war would be the war to end war, and why so many others appear to have believed him.

Biographical note

Richard Benefer took his degree in English from Sussex University. Currently employed as a manager at Staffordshire University, where he's working on a MPhil/PhD proposal to research the impact of propaganda in the First World War, particularly the exhortation by H.G. Wells that it would be the "war to end war".

H. G. Wells wrote of war between humans and of war between humans and non-humans. Yet the intellectual and emotional legacy of these works is contradictory.

In the last year I have become involved in SETI, the scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and have happened upon a remarkable aspect of Wells’s legacy. In The War of the Worlds (1898) Wells defined the modern notion of aliens, ‘intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own,’ and immediately set them in conflict with mankind. After a century of war and of science fiction influenced by Wells, Wells’s Martians remain one fearful model of our expectation of alien life, to the extent that there is currently a fierce controversy within the SETI community about proposed attempts to signal to extraterrestrial civilisations. Some aliens must be warlike, the argument goes; to make our presence obvious would be to invite disaster.

But war is repugnant. Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) is a fine account of the anguish as experienced by Wells aged fifty (my own age now) of the First World War, a conflict in which ‘our only strategy was to barter blood for blood’. The horror of the waste of youth impels Britling to argue that ‘there is no chance of bettering life until we have made an end of all that causes war’. In this Wells evidently reflected a public mood in Britain and Germany at the time.

However many in the SETI community believe that Britling’s anguished longing for an end to war is futile, for even if mankind could discover peace within itself, the universe as a whole must inevitably be plagued by Darwinian carnage. It is a measure of Wells’s capacity of imagination that his works illuminate both sides of this dismaying contradiction.

Biographical Note

Stephen Baxter is a science fiction author whose novels include The Time Ships, an authorised sequel to The Time Machine.

This paper (based on research published in Steve McLean (ed.), H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)) resituates The War of the Worlds (1898) as one of the most influential manifestations of the emergence of a critical ‘postcolonial’ vision in the science and culture of the late Victorian period. At this time, as commentators such as Karl S. Guthke show, ethical unease about the justice and methods of imperialism came to centre on narratives about hypothetical extra-terrestrial encounter, especially in the strand excited by what seemed the very real possibility of life on Mars.

Wells’s writings are fascinated with advanced instruments of vision, not just for expanding the dimensions of scientific knowledge, but the imaginative possibilities they offer for changing how humans think about themselves, their relations with Others and their place in the universe. My paper therefore focuses on the trope of a technologically-enhanced and defamiliarising ‘alien gaze’ in TWOTW, related to new media such as cinema, as a principal means of creating a kind of double vision in his own narrative of Martian invasion. This effectively allows the reader to alternate between the perspective of the complacent colonial subject and the colonised victims of a more ‘advanced’ species, to suggestively critique the British Empire and related forms of terrestrial colonialism based on the ‘evolutionary prerogative’ of social-Darwinist pseudo-science.

To contextualise Wells’s enterprise, I will invoke some contemporary textual and visual examples of a similarly ‘returned gaze’ from the colonial Other, in terms of both scientific developments and alternative examples from scientific romance (notably Kurd Lasswitz’s complementary narrative of Martian imperialism, Auf Zwei Planeten (1897)). I will also briefly trace the subsequent controversy surrounding ‘assumed moral immunity’ to Wells’s anti-colonial subtext in American literary and filmic responses to TWOTW. Some of these (from Garrett P. Servis’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (also 1898) to Roland Emmerich’s film Independence Day (1996)) appeared to advance a new agenda of global cultural and political hegemony while ostensibly saving the world from the threat of extra-terrestrial domination.

Michael Walzer, in his classic work of political philosophy Just and Unjust Wars (1977) notes common patterns in how enemy combatants view each other. When in the heat of battle, soldiers show little compunction in taking human life. However, they often experience a deep repugnance to killing an enemy combatant if he is seen off-duty in a mundane situation—bathing, smoking a cigarette, enjoying a sunrise. Suddenly the adversary appears in his common humanity; he seems naked, vulnerable, non-threatening, and it feels dishonourable to attack him in that state. 'You can't shoot a yawning man,' Bert Smallways discovers in The War in the Air. The enemy's humanity 'is restored,' Walzer writes, 'by the prosaic acts that break down the stereotypes [ . . .]. Because he is funny, naked, and so on, my enemy is changed [. . .] into a man' (142). What happens, however, when the enemy combatant is equally intelligent but totally alien in body and culture? Is any moment of identification possible? These questions were at issue in the late Victorian era, when scientific evidence seemed increasingly to suggest that life on other planets was possible, even likely. How would alien minds and bodies compare to humans—would they be more or less advanced intellectually, morally, technologically; would they be humanoid or some other form? Most importantly—would "they" get along with "us"?

In this paper, I examine these questions through the contradictory figure of the Martian found in George Du Maurier's The Martian (1897) and H.G. Wells's "The Crystal Egg" (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1897-1898). These authors exemplify two widely divergent approaches to embodiment, despite the fact that both men were secular non-Christians, committed to Darwinism. Du Maurier is just one among many of his contemporaries who had great trouble relinquishing the consolations of dualism, notwithstanding his progressive scientific views. Du Maurier's novel suggests that differences in the physical body can be transcended in a communion of souls; thus identification across intelligent species is achievable. In sharp contrast, Wells depicts a much messier state of affairs in which such transcendence proves difficult if not impossible. His narratives portray the propensity of intelligent life forms to think through the body rather than rise above it, with deadly results.

Biographical note

Genie Babb has a BA in Theater from Baylor University and an MA/ Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She has been teaching at the University of Alaska Anchorage since 1992. Research interests include science in the Victorian novel; and contemporary drama/performance studies. She has published in such journals as Narrative, TDR: The Drama Review, and Symbiosis. Her current book project focuses on the mind-body problem in the speculative fiction of H G. Wells.