Article by DJ Nguyen Art by Sana Bhakoo

It’s just a novel. The War of the Worlds, I mean. When talking about stories, it’s easy to reduce things down into small, pointless fantasies. It’s all fiction. Games of imagination. Ink blots on a page that silly humans get invested in for no reason. So why do we care? Why do we care that, in 1898, a 32-year-old English socialist by the name of Herbert George (or H.G.) Wells wrote a book called “The War of the Worlds?” Why do I care enough to write about it?

Well, other than my own interest in the histories of genres (don’t get me started on murder mysteries), The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells is actually quite important. This is a story that created a new monster which culture would hang onto for centuries to come. In fiction, the “monster” is a really particular cultural object. It always means something. That’s why monsters stick in our heads between authors and eras. Zombie apocalypses experiment with human desperation on a societal level. Vampires lurk in the dark, and in doing so ask what the dark means. For Wells, it was space aliens. Through them, he reckoned with inhumanness, and all the fear and philosophy that comes with it — how we feel small, unfamiliar, and afraid when removed from our overwhelmingly comprehensible bubble.

To history-savvy readers who might protest that aliens as a fictional concept had been around long before Wells: you’re right. But his aliens were different beasts altogether. I mean that literally; he created (or at least popularized) a blueprint for thematically representing other worlds that still resonates today. So much so that the plot itself almost seems cliché in hindsight. It’s not hard to describe: one day, a strange asteroid fell to Earth. From within emerged octopus-like creatures from Mars with technology far surpassing ours. At first, humans attempted diplomacy in the form of a white flag. It didn’t pan out. By the end of the book, the Martians are thoroughly desolating the world, abducting humans, feeding on blood, vaporizing with lasers, piloting mechanical tentacles, and other classic alien stuff. Then, a stroke of luck — the Martians have never before encountered Earthly pathogens. And though sickness is entirely familiar to us, it utterly devastates our foes — it doesn’t take very long for the intruders to all fall dead. The world then has a chance to rebuild, but this time under the knowledge that there are things far greater and less kind than us out there in the universe.

I still haven’t really answered the question, why should we care about stories? I gave a half-answer, that Wells’s monsters would go on to make a massive mark in human history, a whole genre of perspective on life outside our bubble. The War of the Worlds was, among other things, a criticism of imperialism — the careless and violent ways us humans have torn each other from our homes, the inhuman otherness in how we have cannibalized each other. And as they’ve traversed our libraries, aliens have continued to be tools for questioning cultural norms. But that doesn’t really make this any more comprehensible. I suppose I don’t really have a complete answer. How about this: I think we all need to care about monsters. What they mean, why they frighten us, and why we are compelled to see monsters where they are absent. They help us contextualize our own fear, our weaknesses and morals, and make us reconsider their place in the real world. As stories of aliens have evolved, so have their thematic strengths. These invaders would keep making us reckon with being human. In a sense, we are the aliens — almost feels trite, doesn’t it? That’s kind of where all monster analysis ends up.

Monsters follow us. They lurk under our beds, stalk us in the darkness that dances along street corners when we’re walking alone at night, and pounce with lethal vengeance despite the fact that we made them up. We are scared of our own shadows.

I wonder if seeing monsters is innate to being human. Maybe we are so often afraid of our surroundings that in order to take some agency over them, we grab our fears and sculpt them like clay.

October 30th, 1938. World War 2 was just bubbling to the surface, a stressful period for everyone. In such times, analyzing entertainment is important. What is the general public interested in? What are they thinking about? And — maybe you saw this coming — what are they afraid of? CBS’s radio play anthology The Mercury Theater on the Air, run by Orson Welles, had no intention of answering the latter question as thoroughly as they were about to. If you know Welles (Orson Welles, not to be confused with H.G. Wells [mind the second ‘e’]), it's probably because of his and his team’s radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.

For a radio play, you have to do some interpretation to get the original emotions of the text across in audio. Welles and his team approached this grandly: after some narration introducing the production, the broadcast was seemingly replaced with an orchestral performance, and some nice music played for a while. And then,

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE INTERRUPT OUR PROGRAM OF DANCE MUSIC TO BRING YOU A SPECIAL BULLETIN FROM THE INTERCONTINENTAL RADIO NEWS. AT TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE EIGHT, CENTRAL TIME, PROFESSOR FARRELL [...] REPORTS OBSERVING SEVERAL EXPLOSIONS OF INCANDESCENT GAS, OCCURRING AT REGULAR INTERVALS ON THE PLANET MARS.

After this, the music returned, before being periodically halted again and again by breaking news reports gradually detailing the events of an alien invasion. These reports were written to feel real — like how the characters in the story would have heard them, helplessly receiving slow updates that the world was ending and there was nothing they could do. It’s understandable that this struck a chord with listeners — hearing World War 2 develop over the radio must have sparked a very specific type of dread, one which Welles and his team had distilled into this apocalyptic tale. That feeling hasn’t changed much in the present, has it?

But there was a problem: imagine tuning into the radio and hearing a breaking news bulletin. It’s a politically tense time — you’re used to hearing these. You’re used to these interruptions bringing bad news. And when the official-sounding newscaster reports a strange presence in the sky, well… is it really so far-fetched that you might panic?

You wouldn’t have been alone. Millions were tuned in, and a significant portion missed the clearly fictional narration at the beginning. It’s just a story, remember? Nothing about a story inherently matters. And yet, as the New York Times reported,

RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT

Telephone lines were tied up with calls from listeners or persons who had heard of the broadcasts. Many sought first to verify the reports. But large numbers, obviously in a state of terror, asked how they could follow the broadcast’s advice and flee from the city, whether they would be safer in the “gas raid” in the cellar or on the roof, how they could safeguard their children, and many of the questions which had been worrying residents of London and Paris during the tense days before the Munich agreement.

So for a short time, America was thrust into a historic mass hysteria event. It was a nation buckling under years of collective stress, to the extent that the New York police department had to issue a public statement urging people to calm down — civilians reported seeing smoke, hearing voices, attempting to evacuate, and the streets were flooded with chaos. There were even several reports of people being physically injured, desperate urgency impairing their decision-making. The gossip and fear essentially caused a sort of psychosis, turning the nation’s monsters real.

I’m not sure I could pick a better novel for this to have happened with. The War of the Worlds is already, without any of this crisis, an extremely important part of literary history. I don’t think H.G. Wells’s goal was to show how different his monsters were from us — like many alien stories, the compelling paradox resides in how much of ourselves we see in the unfamiliar. We shouldn’t relate to these frightening, apocalyptic beings — so why do we? Imperialism is a normal human activity, until it isn’t. That dissonance is what made them stick around.

Space aliens are in fact much more plausible than zombies or vampires — they’re scientific, primed for reality, and that’s where a lot of their power comes from. Then, when Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater on the Air pulled this stunt, it’s like the monsters couldn’t help but pay our world a visit.

After the broadcast was all over and everyone calmed down, the country was left with a stunning embarrassment. Much of it was taken out on Welles personally, but as it aged, the broadcast of The War of the Worlds became a cautionary tale about how susceptible we all are. That we sculpt monsters even on accident, and run ourselves in circles trying to avoid them. How silly; it was just a story, all along.

III

History-savvy readers: don’t worry, I know what’s going on here. You'll have to forgive my theatrics, I was trying to get a point across — besides, I did promise that each The War of the Worlds iteration would have an increasingly complicated relationship with truth. I’ll rectify it right now. Non-history-savvy readers: I have a confession to make.

This story which I have just told you in the previous section… Well, it’s a bit of an exaggeration. Which is to say, it was a lie. The parts about Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater on the Air were real — that was a genuine broadcast which adapted The War of the Worlds. They really did format things that way. And I do sincerely believe that this format of storytelling corresponded quite poignantly with the war-anxious America that it aired for. There were even a few people confirmed to have believed the events being narrated were real. But things begin to fall apart just around the moment I showed you that New York Times article.

By 1938, the time of this story, the landscape of journalism was far from a united front (the more I learn about history, the more I’m inclined to believe that nothing has ever changed). Radio and print were at direct odds. Radio was far more accessible, fun, and novel. Because of this, radio was actively pulling readers away from the papers. There was a real rivalry between the two forms of media, so when The Mercury Theater on the Air’s disruptive formatting actually convinced a handful of people that Martians might be invading, the papers spotted an opportunity. Here was a panic caused by the inherent flaws in their opponent’s medium. This could be the warning that the nation needs: radio is unreliable, its newfangled messiness leaving the opportunity for misinformation and hysteria. Americans should stick to the tried-and-true reliability of a daily newspaper. The problem, of course, was that this so-called “panic” was rather small. If only they could just… turn the volume up a little bit.

So they did. That excerpt from earlier was real, it just wasn’t true. They inflated or downright fabricated reports of hysteria in order to portray the broadcast as some catastrophic national terror. Looking back at actual media surveys and first-hand accounts of the night, The War of the Worlds plainly did not have the impact it’s been mythologized to. It wasn’t just the New York Times — this was a widespread misinformation campaign across print journalism to discredit radio. It worked, on some level. While the radio certainly did not die at that moment, the rosy legend of Welles’s impact on the world has long persisted. If someone nowadays knows of the broadcast, they almost always recount tales of human imagination leaking monsters into the world.

I suppose that is what happened anyways. It was intentional — which feels worse — but rather than a night of panic, the papers created decades of myths, moralizations, and campfire stories that have seeped farther into our culture than was likely ever expected. The irony of it all is that this really was a story about how susceptible we are. The first time I heard about The War of the Worlds was in a mini documentary, which relayed this lie. I found it completely believable — stranger has happened in human history, after all. When I learned that it was false, I was weirdly disappointed. I wanted the fairy tale to be real. Maybe on some level, it affirmed a blurriness in reality that was comforting. In a way, that is how I experience the world — fictional frequencies pressing into nightmares. It felt nice to know that I wasn’t alone.

As fabricated as the whole incident was, it did bring the monsters to life in a way. Not just because we believed them, but also because it portrayed them in a new light: radio. Radio was the monster. And even just like H.G. Wells wrote, the fight eventually died. Not completely, obviously, but the two mediums learned how to coexist. The invasion sorted itself out. And when the myth grew beyond its origin, it was still ultimately about monsters. I found something compelling and familiar in the idea that our imagined monsters were inescapable, and once again, I wasn’t alone.

I’ve had the idea to write this article for some time. It was going to be an unbiased, factual report of three layers of history — quite academic. Obviously, things didn’t turn out that way. When I actually sat down to write the thing, I couldn’t separate myself from the story. I don’t think there's anything wrong with that, but it does change things. It does mean that, as much as I’ve tried to give you the truth, it has been warped by my own ways of communicating and researching. I suppose that would have happened either way.

I can give an example. In avoiding distracting information, I left out the fact that H.G. Wells was a eugenicist. As progressive as many themes of his work were, he advocated for the shaping of the human gene pool via selective, “scientific” sterilization. Maybe to him, difference was its own sort of monster. Humans can’t help but tell stories, and stories can’t help but be false.

In writing this, I have told a new story too, a new adaptation — just like Orson Welles did, and print journalism after him. Which means, in some sense, it is the same tale. I’m dealing with the same themes, the same monsters. It’s very abstract this fourth time around, but still here. As we traverse levels of existence, our demons remain on our shoulders. In a sense, they have to, because they are the same as us. That’s where all monster analysis ends.

Ultimately, a monster can’t be anything other than a story. That feels reductive at first, but I think it imbues them with a very real power. They are how we express ourselves (as Wells did), how we express the world around us (as Welles did), how we get what we want (as the papers did), and how we orient our own thinking (as I am doing, right now). Dark cannot exist without light, good cannot exist without evil, and reality cannot exist without fiction. Fantasy makes us real. That’s why we can’t stop making stuff up.