{Lindsay} Second Week

I just finished War of the Worlds. It was pretty much nothing of what I was expecting, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I hadn't realized before I started it that it was written in 1898. It was a bit weird reading about horse-drawn carriages and Martians with advanced technology within the same paragraph, but I liked that it's a sci-fi novel that doesn't go overboard with the science part. In terms of the plot, there really isn't that much action. It's told in the first person, and the narrator is merely an observer of everything that is happening when aliens invade England. He's not a hero, he doesn't do epic battle with the Martians and save the day, but instead spends the entirety of the novel running away and hiding, while describing all the carnage and destruction along the way.

The one thing I really liked was that Wells kept making comparisons to humans under attack from the Martians and insects and small animals under attack from humans. At one point he writes something about how the Martians were destroying everything in their path with no thought to who or what they trampled, much like a human will destroy an anthill without thought for the ants within it that are going on with their own lives. Throughout the whole novel is this same kind of commentary on humanity's sense of superiority in relation to the rest of the natural world, and since I tend to think that this superiority is total bullshit, I was diggin it.

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