March 22, 2023

Everything Would Have Changed

Or not.

I signed up for a science fiction writing class soon after I had the idea for The Great War of the Worlds (GWOTW.) While I had already written many blog posts and book chapters about technology, I was (and still am) terrified of fiction. Writing about technology is easy because there’s usually one right answer. Fiction has an infinite number of wrong ones.

We were asked to hand in a chapter toward the end of class. I don’t remember what I handed in, but it was probably one of the many versions of the opening chapter I’ve written over the past few years.

The teacher’s feedback was mostly positive. But he said one thing that stuck with me because I'm still not sure if I agree with him or not.

“It’s a great idea, but you need to change history more. Everything would have changed!”

I remember being a little puzzled because whatever I did give him, it was a single scene of around 2500 words. How did he know I hadn’t changed enough? More importantly, would everything have changed?

Let’s start with a quick recap of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds:

1. Astronomers see explosions on the surface of Mars, and objects heading toward Earth.

2. The meteorites1 land on Earth. They look odd.

3. OMG. It’s aliens and they’re here to eat us. They have walking machines, heat rays, and poison gas.

4. As advanced as they are, they don't use vaccines and refuse to wear masks. Our Terran microbes kill them.

5. The End.

The end? Huh? No way!

Heat-rays! Walkers! Black Smoke! How did they power that stuff? How did it fit in those cylinders they launched from Mars? Did they have a way to get off Earth when they were done? And, of course, the big question: what did those Victorian-era folks do with that stuff after the Martians dropped dead?

Let’s throw a dart in the calendar and say the attack happened in 1895 when Wells started writing the story. The 1890s were an interesting time for technology.

The War of the currents, in which Edison sponsored killing animals to show people how dangerous his competition was, ended a few years earlier. People were still getting comfortable with electricity.

Vacuum tubes were still a decade or so away. The first gasoline-powered bus hit the streets in 1895. Singer’s first electric sewing machine was six-years-old.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered X-Rays and was still figuring out why there were useful, and we were more than a decade from even grasping at the idea of nuclear physics. But at the same time, Tesla was playing around with X-Rays in New York City. He decided it would be fun to make a gun with them and play tag with Mark Twain. He also founded his own company and burnt down a warehouse in 1895.

How quickly would the scientific giants of 1895 have figured out Martian Technology? When Wells described his Martian attackers and their weapons, he was imagining technology that was out of reach at the time. They were attackers that could dominate Britain’s military.

While some of the scientific breakthroughs that eventually led to the world we live in today occurred in the late 19th Century, mass manufacturing, mass media, and global communications were still a couple of decades away. They would have needed time to figure out how to use the technology, and its influence on history would have been subtle.

Cory Doctorow has said that science fiction is Luiddite literature:

In truth, Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.

How would the world have reacted to the invasion, and how would that have affected how the technology was used?

How have countries reacted to invasions in the past? Think about how the U.S. reacted to Pearl Harbor at home or to 9/11 around the world. Think about how the Soviets responded to the Germans when they invaded during World War II. Nations tend to punish their own people while exacting revenge on the rest of the world.

I had a brief rundown of what the world looked like in the mid-1890s in a post last November. (I was using 1897 for the year of the invasion before I moved it to 1895. Because I can.)

Great Britain is still an empire under Queen Victoria. Germany is ruled by Wilhelm II. Tsar Nicholas II was coronated a year earlier. The Ottoman Empire was in decline, and France’s Third Empire was thriving. Eastern Europe is the mess that will eventually trigger World War I.

In the United States, it’s the tail end of the Gilded Age, or the beginning of the Progressive Era, depending on who you ask. Railroads were shortening distances. William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and was navigating escalating tensions with Spain. The United States was experiencing serious growing pains and was still turned inwards.

Great Britain and Germany waged a naval arms race for more than a decade. Japan invaded Taiwan in 1895. Russia and Japan fight a war from 1904-05. The Boxer Rebellion was in 1900. The U.S. and Spain fought a war in 1898. McKinley is assassinated in 1901.2

That’s only scratching the surface. War is a constant throughout human history, but the late 1800s and early 1900s were nuts, with some empires gasping for air while others stood up and stretched their legs.

Is there any reason to believe the Martian technology would have been put to peaceful use? Would Germany, England and the other empire have sat back while industry used the new technology to make people’s lives better? Would they have tried to bury it? Or bury it in public while privately making weapons?

What do you think? How much would things have changed? That's a real question. Tell me what you think in the comments.

Note: I can’t put links in image captions. Find out more about Corrêa here.

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Eric Goebelbecker
Trick of the Tale LLC
25 Veterans Plaza #5276
Bergenfield, NJ 07621-9998