Transformers vs. Martians

[Sidewinder]

Clearly, the journalist should have been an atheist in 1894, right?

I never claimed the narrator should have been an atheist, I merely quoted the lines supporting the claim that he's a devout Christian. Whether or not he should've been an atheist is something I'll let other readers decide.

[Sidewinder]

GHETTO: holy shit, your own fucking quote includes the journalist shrugging off the artilleryman's ideas! He found them attractive in a time of desperation - as people often find totalitarianism attractive - and then shares a laugh with the reader as the ideas are so utterly laughable, even to a Victorian mindset! :lol: Clearly this is the book 'promoting' the artilleryman's ideas, right? Fucking JESUS.

I admit I may have misinterpreted this line:

For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the
tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my
mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny
and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader
who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position,
reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine,
crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by
apprehension.

Comments by other readers?

[Stark]

Hey why don't you ignore 95% of my post, cockhead?

You'll never catch me saying that Wells is a saint, but when you make outrageous claims like 'WotW supports Nazi-like authoritarianism' based on a pile of shit that even refutes what you're saying, you're not going to get away with it.

The characters the journalist meet during his journey are different attitudes struggling with the idea of forgein domination: the priest believes god has forsaken mankind and that the invaders are the devil, the artilleryman believes humans should move into a military insurgency to survive, etc. This doesn't mean the book *supports* these ideas by broken men failing to deal with the situation - indeed, as a child it was obvious to me that both these people had lost it and couldn't deal with the changed situation.

When the aliens are defeated, the world returns pretty much to normal. Nobody tries to implement any retarded ideas about underground cities, because as obvious to the journalist, his Victorian reader and the reader, they're FUCKING RETARDED IDEAS.

[Utsanomiko]

The book is also a swell manual for tunnel-digging.

[Stark]

Sidewinder
Just because something is IN a book, doesn't mean the book PROMOTES it. It's called 'contrast' and 'drama'. Wells wanted to show comfortable Victorian Englishmen that what they did to Africans could happen to them, and how their whole world would be thrown into chaos overnight and they wouldn't even understand what was happening until the aliens were dragging them away in their machines. By showing Victorian attitudes failing to deal with this, it encourages the reader to imagine how they themselves would feel in the situation. Without the segments of characters trying to deal intellectually with what was going on, it wouldn't be very effective.

[Anguirus]

In case it wasn't clear, "Martians remembering to wash their hands" is a funny way of saying "let's assume the diseases don't slaughter them at least until they've either fought off or lost to the Transformers."

I was going to speculate on how the Martians could possibly hold their own with massed-fire tactics on open battlefields, but suddenly this thread took a turn for the interesting.

[Ryan Thunder]

The Transformers probably die because they can't penetrate the shields.

Mind; any lasers they have will likely be effective, since visible light seems to be quite capable of making it through, and even a few RPGs can take down a Tripod sans its shield.

A modern force could probably cause significantly more damage than they did in the movie by not setting up a bloody static firing line.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Sidewinder
Just because something is IN a book, doesn't mean the book PROMOTES it. It's called 'contrast' and 'drama'. Wells wanted to show comfortable Victorian Englishmen that what they did to Africans could happen to them, and how their whole world would be thrown into chaos overnight and they wouldn't even understand what was happening until the aliens were dragging them away in their machines. By showing Victorian attitudes failing to deal with this, it encourages the reader to imagine how they themselves would feel in the situation. Without the segments of characters trying to deal intellectually with what was going on, it wouldn't be very effective.

Fuckin' A! It amazes me how many people don't have a damn clue about the book and start off with this backwards reasoning that Wells is promoting God/eugenics/moving all our cities underground and building mechas. That logic may as well apply to ANY story. Hey, I hear Lucas supports evil overlord empires because he had one in his stories.

The simple premise of the story is about us, lords of our domain answering to no one (bar our fabled Gawd), being fucked HARD by a superior foe who, thanks to their own arrogance, just about stop short of wiping us out. It's a totally fitting story and the basis for every alien invasion story after it, only they can't be original and so a deus ex machina flaw is thrown in as they wrote themselves into a corner following TWOTW. A short story with a parable-esque lesson is all it was meant to be; hell, it wasn't even a proper novel at first given it was a serial in a local paper to start with.

I do have the '50s Haskin movie on DVD though, if only because the anti-commie slant is hilarious and the special effects are superb for the time.

[Sidewinder]

Fuckin' A! It amazes me how many people don't have a damn clue about the book and start off with this backwards reasoning that Wells is promoting God/eugenics/moving all our cities underground and building mechas. That logic may as well apply to ANY story. Hey, I hear Lucas supports evil overlord empires because he had one in his stories.

Conceded.