By J.T. Mulholland
In writing “The Fighting Machine” I wanted to create an alternate history examining what the works of H.G. Wells might have looked like if had he written for The Navy and Army Illustrated (1895 – 1903). In our timeline this would never have happened as H.G. Wells was a socialist. I wrote the story as an adventurous abridged retelling of The War of the Worlds (1898), crafting a pro-imperialist message as opposed to the anti-imperialist one that Wells intended. I did so because The Navy and Army Illustrated was a magazine designed to familiarise the general public with the armed forces, thus generating a greater sense of patriotism. With that in mind, it would only make sense to rewrite a Wellsian classic as a pro militaristic action adventure.
I included allusions to The War of the Worlds by rewording some of its iconic lines through a pro-imperialist lense and co-opting characters such as The Artilleryman. I did so not only to help my story feel Wellsian but to illustrate how easy it is to alter an author’s intended message. In The War of the Worlds, The Artilleryman is a character we first meet in Book One Chapter Eleven. He arrives at the house of The Journalist (the nameless narrator of the text) as a traumatized man. He tells The Journalist his horrific account of how he witnessed his fellow soilder massacred by the Martian fighting machines.
In Book Two Chapter Seven, The Journalist encounters The Artilleryman again, this time hiding in an abandoned house. The Artilleryman believes that humanity must start again and has plans to build an underground tunnel. However, The Journalist discovers that The Artilleryman’s plans are just that – plans, and no more ‑ since The Artilleryman constantly takes breaks and spends a lot of his time drinking. This development I chose to omit given the limitations of the short story format.
The Artilleryman is the main representative of the British military in The War of the Worlds and presented as a broken man who has turned to drink. In my short story, I reimagined The Artilleryman (who I named as “Privet” Malcolm Childers) as a loyal soldier who helps the heroic Captain St. Gabriel defeat The Fighting Machine. In doing so, I have deliberately altered H.G. Wells anti-imperialist message into pro-militaristic propaganda to demonstrate how easy it is to alter an author’s intended message.
We see this constantly in adaptations of The War of the Worlds, notably in the Roland Emmerich film Independence Day (1996). In an interview for The Guardian Roland Emmerich stated that The War of the Worlds was an inspiration: “Me and Dean Devlin wrote the script. I had an office right next to Book Soup on Sunset, and I went in there and bought the classics like War of the Worlds but they were all too old-fashioned.” Unlike in the Wells, where military might fails, Independence Day sees the alien invaders defeated by a combination of American technology (Jeff Goldblum) and the might and heroism of the American military (Will Smith): “old-fashioned” seems to be used in this case as a term that rejects Wells’s anti-imperialism; by implication, the “modern” is an embrace of everything that Wells was critiquing even while following the outlines of the story.
To show how the publishing industry worked – and that parts of a journal need to “fit” with the rest in some way – I decided to create a photo-shopped illustrated title based on that of the short story “Forewarned” by Major Arthur Griffiths in No.57 of The Navy and Army Illustrated (18th of February 1898), page 19.
To create my new composite, I also used an illustration of a group of soldiers who appeared to be firing at something. I found this image in No. 68 of The Navy and Army Illustrated (21st of May 1898) on page 24.
I combined this image with an illustration of a Martian fighting machine by Henrique Alvim-Corrêa (1876 – 1910). I chose to combine these images in particular as I felt that they aesthetically matched the time period my story was set in. In fact, I based my description of the fighting machine (suitably exaggerated by Privet Childers) on Henrique Alvim-Corrêa’ s illustration which was itself based loosely on Wells’s own descriptions.
I used one of the two circular spaces in the original that lists the author’s other literary works to re-imagine classic titles by H.G. Wells with a militaristic spin. The Invisible Spy is meant to recall The Invisible Man while The Chronic Soldier is meant to recall the first version of The Time Machine called “The Chronic Argonauts.” This additional material that stretches beyond the story was a form of world building since my project imagines what the works of H.G. Wells might have looked like had he indeed written for The Navy and Army Illustrated.
I also included a couple of references to the BBC science fantasy series Doctor Who (1963 -1989, 1996, 2005 – Present) through the characters of Brigadier Gorden Courtney and General Nicholas Stewart (their names are references to Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart, an ally of The Doctor, played by the actor Nicholas Courtney). I deliberately made these references for two reasons. I did so, first, as a fan of the show and, second, because the stories of 1960s Doctor Who do parallel the H.G. Wells stories The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. In The Time Machine, the nameless time traveller visits the far future where humanity has split into two species, the benevolent Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks. The Time Traveller must break into the Morlocks underground city to get his time machine back. In the first Dalek story (21December 1963 – 01February 1964) The Doctor (a mysterious time traveller whose name is a mystery) arrives on the planet Skaro and encounters two species, the benevolent Thals and the monstrous Daleks. The Doctor must break into the Dalek city to get the components for his time machine (the TARDIS) back. The Daleks themselves are similar to the Martians from The War of the Worlds as they are octopus like beings that operate tank like fighting machines. Like the Martians, they have invaded the earth (though the Daleks did it three more times: Day of the Daleks, Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways and The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End). I mention these two stories as an example of H.G. Wells’s influence on popular culture and to help us reflect on what might have changed if he really had written for pro-imperial publications like The Navy and Army Illustrated.
In my short story, the character of Privet Malcolm Childers mispronounces his words (including of course his own title, “Privet”). I chose deliberately to misspell certain words in Privet Childers’ monologue in order to indicate an accent. This reflects H.G. Wells’s practice in “transcribing” the speech of British soldiers in The War of the Worlds. In Book One Chapter Nine, a group of soldiers argue over how they are going to defeat the Martian fighting machine and H.G. Wells lends them the conventional transcription of a stereotypical working-class accent. I chose to reference this style in order to make my story feel Wellsian. I also included the deliberate misspelling of Hindu as “Hindoo” and the misnomer “Mohammedan” to describe Muslims. I chose to do so in order to make my story feel it was written during the time of the British Raj. There are numerous other stylistic borrowings as well. Many will make us uncomfortable as readers in 2020, but it is even more problematic to pretend that such attitudes did not exist.
Other considerations I took into account comprised my division of the short story into six chapters because stories like “Forewarned” by Major Arthur Griffiths were serialised in The Navy and Army Illustrated. Different perspectives were given just as they in The War of the Worlds. Finally, in order to help my short story feel like something that was serialised, I ended each mini chapter with a cliff-hanger since a magazine that published original fiction would want to keep their readers coming back for more. The War of the Worlds was originally published by Pearson’s Magazine (1896 – 1939) in a serialized format.
To read the story itself, see here.
References
PROJECT GUTENBERG (20 September 2019) Project Gutenberg’s eBook of The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. Available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm
(Accessed: 29 February 2020)
The British Library (15 May 2014) H G Wells’s politics article written by Matthew Taunton. Available at:
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/h-g-wells-politics#
(Accessed: 31 March 2020)
The British Library (No Date) The War of the Worlds illustrated by Henrique Alvim-Corrêa. Available at:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-war-of-the-worlds-illustrated-by-henrique-alvim-correa
(Accessed: 02 April 2020
The British Library (No Date) The War of the Worlds from Pearson’s Magazine. Available at:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-war-of-the-worlds-from-pearsons-magazine
(Accessed: 03 April 2020)
Royal Museums Greenwich (30 April 2013) Navy and Army Illustrated | Royal Museum Greenwich Blog. Available at:
https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/navy-and-army-illustrated
(Accessed: 31 March 2020)
The Genealogist (13 January 2017) The Navy and Army Illustrated A fascinating and copiously illustrated resource… . Available at:
https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2017/the-navy-and-army-illustrated-410/
(Accessed: 31 March 2020)
The Guardian (8 November 2016) How we made Independence Day Interviews by Ben Beaumont-Thomas. Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/08/how-we-made-independence-day-roland-emmerich
(Accessed: 31 March 2020)
Oxford Open Learning (11 November 2015) H.G. Wells: The Father of Science Fiction Posted by: Alice Kirby. Available at:
(Accessed: 31 March 2020)
The Online Books Page (No Date) Pearson’s Magazine archive – The Online Book Page. Available at:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=pearsonsuk
(03 April 2020)
BBC Classic Doctor Who Episode Guide (24 October 2014) The Daleks. Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/daleks/index.html
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
BBC Classic Doctor Who Episode Guide (24 October 2014) The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/dalekinvasion/index.html
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
BBC Classic Doctor Who Episode Guide (24 October 2014) Day of the Daleks. Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/dayofdaleks/index.html
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
BBC One (2020) BBC One – Doctor Who, Series 1, Bad Wolf. Available at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074dth
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
BBC One (2020) BBC One – Doctor Who, Series 1, The Parting of the Ways. Available at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074dv1
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
BBC One (2020) BBC One – Doctor Who, Series 4, The Stolen Earth. Available at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cccvg
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
BBC One (2020) BBC One – Doctor Who, Series 4, Journey’s End. Available at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cgnjr
(Accessed: 02 April 2020)
Cliffnotes.com (2020) Critical Essays The British Raj in India. Available at:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-passage-to-india/critical-essays/the-british-raj-in-india
(Accessed: 03 April 2020)
Wikipedia (22 March 2020) Glossary of the British Raj. Available at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_the_British_Raj
(Accessed: 03 April 2020)