‘INDISCRIMINATE AND UNIVERSAL DESTRUCTION’? WARFARE AND NATURE IN H. G. WELLS’S THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Abstract

This article focuses on H. G. Wells’s portrayal in The War of the Worlds (1898) of the adverse environmental effects of warfare. It also analyses a second provocative way in which the novel depicts human wars: as insignificant when viewed from the perspective of species not directly affected by our military conflicts. This article concludes by examining how the novel further attacks anthropocentrism by depicting the ecologically sophisticated idea that military violence might even be good for some forms of nonhuman life. In short, we examine The War of the Worlds as a work demonstrating Wells’s consciousness that war, an event seemingly unique to humans, is always enmeshed in the living environment that surrounds it.