I should begin with some personal disclosures. As long-time readers, colleagues, and friends will know, I am low-key obsessed with H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. I teach it whenever I can; I published on its 1898 American rip-offs in the journal English Literature in Transition; I have presented on Marvel's Killraven, a schlocky 1970s sequel; I will argue this summer at a conference that M. T. Anderson's Landscape with Invisible Hand is an adaptation of it; and I have read and watched far, far too many versions of it. One of my dream book projects is to cover its various versions and iterations. So you can imagine my sadness and disappointment when I realized Peter J. Beck had beat me to the punch with a book from Bloomsbury Academic.

All of this is to forewarn you that when I say I don't like this book, I might just be biased because 1) I wanted to write this book, but also 2) it's not how I would have written it. Beck is a historian, and the book strongly emphasizes the history of The War of the Worlds. There's a lot of thorough, interesting background on where the book was written and when, both in terms of society/culture and in terms of Wells's personal life. About the first half of the book is given over to this. The weak part of the first half is Beck's handle on the novel itself; his interpretation of the book (in a chapter called "The War of the Worlds: Storyline and Methodology") is pretty short and pretty formulaic, to the point you wonder why he bothered. A lot of this I knew already, but then I'm pretty deep in the (red) weeds on Wells, so many readers will probably get more out of this than me. It's a lucid account of the book's writing and publication, even if it doesn't say much about the novel qua novel.

The discussion of the novel's "multimedia afterlife" covers a lot of ground very quickly, and sometimes the focus is odd. Comics and graphic novels get a mere two pages! There is a chapter on the 1898 American version, which I was happy to see draws heavily on my ELT article. (It also draws heavily on a LiveJournal post I made in 2009 during my first year of graduate school; never thought I'd see that incorporated into my citation count!)

There's a very thorough chapter on the 1938 Orson Welles version, and a much more superficial one on other radio versions of the novel. The discussions of the two major film versions (George Pal's 1953 and Steven Spielberg's 2005) are also pretty quick. The problem in these, as in much of the book, is Beck's historian mindset. He's interested in how these things got made, and somewhat interested in reactions to them, but there's not much analyses of the actual adaptations. If I were writing this book, I'd be focusing on the way the stories took Wellsian ideas and imagery and reworked them in different times and places.

Beck is really interested in Woking, the London suburb where Wells wrote the novel, and where much of the novel takes place. This helps the early parts of the novel, but diminishes its later parts, because I feel like Beck is too quick to dismiss adaptations that move the story out of Victorian Woking. The Spielberg film, for example, feels criticized for the fact that Spielberg didn't want to make a period piece. I don't like this attitude (as I've written about before), because it neglects that Wells was not writing a period piece. Wells was writing a story about aliens disrupting our complacency in the here and now. An adaptation that maintains the Victorian setting isn't doing what Wells was doing, it's doing something completely different. Now, Beck doesn't have to share this approach, but I wish he was more sympathetic to the motives of adapters that relocate the setting.

Relatedly, I also wish he was less sympathetic to Jeff Wayne's mediocre disco musical version of the novel, an adaptation whose valorization I will never understand except for reasons of kitsch. But for some reason it gets more than twice as much space as the Spielberg film despite being substantially less interesting from a literary and adaptative perspective.

There are also some oddities of structure. There are a couple chapters that lay things out in really brief detail that get covered more comprehensively later on, in a way that feels redundant. The second-last chapter for some reason includes a catalogue of the places Wells lived while writing the novel, the information from which really ought to have been folded into the first half of the book.

All that said, I'm worried that I'm biased because I'm jealous. But on the other hand, I'm kind of glad it's not the book I would have written-- because that means when I finally try to write my book, there will still be a gap in the world that it can squeeze into.

In 1895, H. G. Wells moved to Woking, Surrey. He was almost thirty, a journalist and writer on the make.

Plagued by a kidney and liver injured playing football and with lungs that occasionally bled from the foul air of London, he wasn’t sure how much time he had left.

And he had bills to pay and a new wife, his second, to support.

His reputation wasn’t secure. The Time Machine had been critically acclaimed, but The Island of Dr. Moreau was not popular with readers or critics.

When he left Woking after finishing the first version of The War of the Worlds, his reputation was secured, and he became a writer with an international following. Money followed which was a good thing because he would need it for all his many mistresses and illegitimate children. (Wells’ stated cure for writer’s block was sex twice a day and that often was not with his wife.)

What Beck and publisher Bloomsbury Academic present is a literary biography of Wells’ novel and all its multimedia adaptations that followed.

Beck’s book is a model of how to combine academic trappings and readability. The chapters are clearly introduced and followed by conclusions. The book is full of footnotes, maps, tables, a bibliography, and index. Yet the prose is free of jargon, full of information, and the repetition kept to a minimum if you want to read it cover to cover rather than just go to a particular section.

And the kindle edition works well in accessing all these functions, even accessing footnoted websites.

First off, there are multiple versions of The War of the Worlds.

Wells’ tale first appeared serialized in 1896 in Pearson’s Magazine. Wells originally conceived a 75,000 word story, but the publisher wanted only 50,000.

Next up the story was serialized in America in The Cosmopolitan Magazine and two newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and Boston Sunday Post. All three included more material that Wells planned on putting in the book publication. The newspapers, in what would become an enduring trend in adapting Wells’ novel, localized the setting for their readers. Now the tripods, with accompanying illustrations, menaced Boston Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. Wells’ narrator, “the man from Woking”, became “the man from Irvington” or “the man from Concord”. These were not pirated editions. Wells had sold his rights to the newspapers, but he was not pleased with the unauthorized changes.

In 1898, the book edition came out, but Wells tinkered with the tale, as he often did with earlier works he thought had been too hurriedly written, for the next few editions. The 1924 edition is considered the definitive one and used for reprints.

There are obvious influences of the time on Wells’ tale: the future war story (though Wells’ invaders aren’t bested by any man) and fin de siècle nervousness about whether human progress could continue.

But there are some less obvious ones.

Lovers of the English countryside like Wells feared London and its suburbs would swallow it. Would modernity destroy, as Richard Jefferies’ hinted in After London, that green and pleasant land? Wells turned modern technology, in the form of the Martian, loose on England's land.

Wells found Woking and its surrounding countryside not only an escape from foul London but also a place to go on the walks he loved and his “cyclomania”. (Wells’ earlier novel, The Wheels of Chance, features a bicyclist as hero.)

But Woking had a peculiar place in the English mind. It was not only an early commuter suburb where most of the population hopped a train to work in London. It was a necropolis.

The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company built a large cemetery there to alleviate the lack of burial ground in London, and the country’s first crematorium was built there. The local football team was nicknamed “the Cremators”, and town boosters asked that the crematorium and cemetery not be mentioned in promotional literature.

The burning countryside around Woking in Wells’ story may have brought the crematorium to mind in readers, and London being called “a city of the dead” may also have brought Woking to mind.

Wells did non start the science fiction tradition of authors destroying their hometowns. Woking was not his hometown. Bromley was, but, on his bicycle rides and looking out the window of his study on Maybury Hill (where his narrator also lives), Wells took great delight in fictionally destroying the countryside and vexing his neighbors with Martians.

And the countryside of the tale is very faithful to the historical Woking and environs. Beck even concludes his book by looking at the ways that “heritage efforts” have sought to mark the places of the tale and Wells’ life in the area.

Wells’ story, of course, has elements of Darwinism and socialism and capitalizes on the contemporary interest about Mars and its hypothetical inhabitants. And there is Wells’ characteristic tendency, noted by George Orwell, to shake the reader out of complacency and show that things can change very quickly, and for the worse, even in the heart of the world’s greatest empire.

The initial germs for the story, besides Wells’ early speculation on humanity’s future in his essay “The Extinction of Man” and his tale of “The Stolen Bacillus” and British imperialism (the references in the novel to the fate of the Tasmanians), were a chance remark by his older brother about Earth being invaded by “a vastly superior Power” and Forbes Dawson’s 1895 novel A Sensational Trance with its vision of a depopulated London.

Beck talks about the many radio adaptations of Wells’ story besides Orson Welles’ famous version. There were several adaptations in the US and UK as well as in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Portugal.

Following the work of Robert Bartholomew, Beck comes down on the revisionist side about the alleged panic in 1938 following Welles’ broadcast. He mostly blames the sloppy research underlying sociologist Robert Cantril’s 1940 book The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panics and newspapers eager to castigate radio as a bad news source.

Beck talks about the many of movie and tv adaptations of Wells’ story including some obscure post-Steven Spielberg ones.

Besides Wells novel, I was also interested in the story behind Jeff Wayne’s musical adaptation of which I’ve very fond. Beck is informative on the subject.

Beck also looks at the many works of fiction and comic books which have adapted parts of Wells’ story or alluded to it.

Definitely recommended for those interested in Wells or this novel. ( )