The Beginnings of a Genre

Something that I think we could have talked about more in the class discussion was how influential War of the Worlds has been on science-fiction and the alien sub-genre in particular. As such an early work it had an almost unfathomable effect on all writers of alien related fiction that would follow.

The first and most obvious way that War of the Worlds influenced future sci-fi is the aliens. The martians are described as being comprised almost completely of brain. This idea of an alien with a huge head has been almost standard in much of the work in the genre. From E.T. to the aliens in Signs to the Great Gazoo, in our popular culture we constantly see aliens has having disproportionally large heads. To go along with this increased head size is usually an increased intellect, something that was also pioneered by Wells.

This increased intellect brings us from the aliens to their technology. The concept of an energy weapon is something so commonplace in science-fiction, it is almost impossible to imagine sci-fi without them, and War of the Worlds helped to pioneer this idea. Instead of the weapons based on light that we would later see, Wells gives the martians a beam of an even more basic form of energy: heat. And to go along with this weapon, the martians have an advanced form of transport in the tripods. These are early forms of Walkers that would later become so prevalent, appearing in countless animes, power rangers and even star wars. This might not be specifically as prevalent in alien-centric sci-fi, but it is still descended from Wells' work, and science fiction would be a very different genre without Voltron or AT-ATs.