I subjected 7- and 9-year-old boys to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds as an audio book recently. It wasn’t as big a hit as I expected. I enjoyed it, though! I didn’t realize how topical the 1895 book was.
*** spoiler alert ***
I wonder if it is time to update this book for a modern audience. Wells’s prediction of industrial robots needs no tweaking, but he has the Martians being killed by an unknown bacterial enemy. In an updated version, the Martians will reject a bivalent vaccine offered by Pfizer and the director of the CDC. Due to this rejection, which happened because Martians had tuned into Fox News from afar, SARS-CoV-2 kills them all.
The book has a powerful description of humans panicking in the face of a threat and a prescient description of how Californians and New Yorkers might react to Martians wanting to cage and breed them so that they could harvest human blood.
All these—the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.
In the updated version, this will be developed further. Wells’s character envisioned a human resistance living on in the sewers. In the update, the resistance will be in Sweden and Florida because Martians can’t tolerate Surströmming and are afraid of alligators. SARS-CoV-2 will take a year to kill the aliens, which will give governors in California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, etc. time to work with federal officials and the Martians to set up the human farms for their respective meek and compliant populations.
Dr. Fauci will leave his portrait-filled study and return to work organizing the development of ventilators powerful enough to treat Martians suffering from COVID-19. The Fauci Protocol will be to put a Martian on vent after 10 “ullas”.
Thought we’d get an Oceangate blog post by now. The democratization of Titanic could have been a Greenspun destination after the world travels.
give it a minute. They still hear tapping every 30 minutes.
Realistically who could tolerate Surströmming except perhaps the Koreans.