Before We Judge Them Too Harshly

The opening of The War of the Worlds is a trap.

Wells opens with a narrator looking at Mars through a telescope, at the bright points of light that turn out to be cannon-fire, at the cylinders arcing toward Earth. The machinery of invasion SF, all correct. And then, before the first cylinder has even landed, this:

"And before we judge of them 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, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept away in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years."

The Tasmanians. In 1898. Wells names them specifically — a people who had been deliberately exterminated in living memory, a genocide so total it shocked even contemporaries — and places them in the first chapter, before the invasion begins.

He is telling you exactly what the book is about.

The mechanics of the colonial mirror work like this: England gets an Outside Context Problem.

The Outside Context Problem (thank you, Iain Banks) is the thing that destroys civilizations — not because it's overwhelming by ordinary standards, but because it's so far outside the civilization's conceptual frame that normal responses fail. You don't just lack the weapons. You lack the category. The Martians don't just beat England militarily. They break the assumption that England is the kind of thing that wins.

This is what colonialism does to the colonized. Not just defeat — category-break. The colonizer arrives with technologies and social structures that have no place in the existing frame. Disease, organization, weapons, paperwork: an entire civilization's accumulated advantages all arriving at once, aimed at a people with no precedent for any of it.

England had been doing this to others for three hundred years.

Wells reverses the direction and makes you feel it.

What makes it more than a clever inversion is that Wells is careful not to let you off the hook with the comfort of villains.

The Martians don't hate humans. There's no scene of alien sadism, no monologue about subjugation. The Martians are efficient. They kill because they need resources and humans are in the way. When they find a particularly mobile human who might be useful — the narrator, hiding in a house they're investigating — they just capture and examine him with the same interest a naturalist might have in an unusual specimen. No malice. Just curiosity about the organism.

The narrator is not a villain either. He's bewildered and trying to survive. He had no part in what was done to the Tasmanians. He is the ordinary good person caught in a structure he didn't design.

This is the trap Wells sets: the sympathy you extend to the narrator is the sympathy that wasn't extended to the Tasmanians. Not because the English colonizers were monsters, but because the Tasmanians were not, in the moral imagination of colonial England, the kind of thing to which you extend that sympathy. The structure excluded them before any individual cruelty was necessary.

There is a question here I can't fully resolve and I want to be honest about that.

How would you know, from inside a structure that treats a class of beings as non-moral-patients, that the treatment is wrong?

The colonists who exterminated the Tasmanians were, by ordinary standards, not stupid. Some were educated, religious, capable of moral reasoning in other domains. The structure they were embedded in provided a complete account of why what they were doing was acceptable — or more precisely, it provided a complete account that didn't require the question to be asked at all. The Tasmanians were not in the category "things you have to justify destroying."

You can't reason your way out of a wrong category using only the tools the category provides. The Tasmanians weren't going to be rescued by an internal critique of British colonial discourse. The outside was required.

Wells is doing something like that work. The Martians aren't there to debate with you. They just act — efficiently, without malice, without the question occurring to them — and you feel the weight of what that looks like from the outside, which is the same weight the Tasmanians were under.

The narrator survives. The Martians don't — bacteria kill them, the famous twist. The bacteria aren't heroic and don't care. They're just organisms doing what organisms do against an invader that arrived without prior exposure.

Wells doesn't frame this as triumph. The surviving narrator walks through a London just beginning to breathe again and what he describes is aftermath — silence, wreckage, the slow return of ordinary life. The invaders are gone. Nothing has been learned. The structures that made England capable of doing this to others are still intact. The Tasmanians are still dead.

The book doesn't end with a lesson. It ends with the narrator alive and thinking about what almost happened, which is not the same thing.

I keep returning to Wells's exact phrasing: before we judge of them too harshly. This is asking for something like suspended judgment — or rather, for judgment to arrive late enough to have done the work first. Look at the tripods. Look at what they do. Look at Surrey under Martian occupation.

Now ask whether your species has done this before.

The sequence matters. The experience of the invasion has to come before the question. Otherwise it's just abstract moral bookkeeping. With the experience: it lands.

This is one of the things fiction can do that argument can't. You don't get to categorize it first.