Original subtitles

In a few minutes there was not a living thing left upon the common,

and every bush and tree

not already a blackened skeleton was burning.

And this was the little world

in which I had been living securely for years.

Never before in the history of warfare

had destruction been so indiscriminate

and so universal.

For that moment I touched an emotion

beyond the common range of men,

yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well.

The fear and empire of man had passed away.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

In 1898, when he published The War of the Worlds,

H.G. Wells disturbed mankind's tranquillity,

revolutionised literature

and shaped the genre of science fiction.

Homo sapiens is a failure

because we haven't produced the brain we needed.

So we shall begin by destroying ourselves

and return to mud and slime,

and we shall deserve it.

To awaken and warn his contemporaries,

Wells had a weapon: fiction.

He needed a terrible threat.

The writer imagined for the first time

that it might come from another planet:

Mars.

The coming of the Martians. Book One.

No one would have believed

in the last years of the nineteenth century

that human affairs

were being watched keenly and closely

by intelligences greater than man's

and yet as mortal as his own.

With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe

about their little affairs, serene in their assurance

of their empire over matter.

It's creepy to think that we are being watched

by some greater intelligence than ourselves.

To encounter a sudden and unexpected enemy

that is vastly more powerful than any nation on Earth,

or even more powerful than all nations on Earth combined,

is a strange and exciting concept

that people had never even considered before.

Across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds

as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,

intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,

regarded this Earth with envious eyes,

and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

And early in the 20th century came the great disillusionment.

You have to remember, at the time that Wells wrote this

no one had ever written an alien invasion story before.

And so the idea of aliens existing and being a threat

and plotting to invade Earth, that was an exciting intro.

I always took pleasure

in giving my readers a fright,

in disturbing their smug confidence

in things as they are,

in showing how thin and fragile

the veneer of civilisation would prove

if some completely unforeseen catastrophe

were to occur.

I think what amused Wells in telling this story

is that the world of men

took thousands of years to build.

And he destroys it in a few pages, in seconds.

And I think that's both a real pleasure,

shall we say, for a novelist, an inventor.

And there's the warning.

Everything we've gained can be lost.

What makes it powerful is that this takes place

in England in 1900, at the Empire's peak.

An island, no less - something unconquerable.

The coasts are defended, England thinks itself invincible

and it's defeated in just a few days. It's mad.

It's a dramatic rupture in English thinking.

Well a lot of people think that Victorian Britain in particular was

rather self-satisfied and entitled.

It had 25% of the world's territory.

As an island, Britain was very secure,

and its naval power would always protect Britain

because it had this rule

that it would have a "two-power standard",

that the British Navy would always be larger

than that of the next two largest naval powers.

And of course what the Martians did was to bypass that.

This location is where the River Wey joins the River Thames,

and this is the River Thames

where a ferry crosses

to the other side of the river at Shepperton.

It was an important part of the story

because it marks the period between the calm and the storm.

A crowd of refugees pressed forward, excited and tumultuous.

"There they are!", cried a man in a blue jersey.

Quickly appeared two, three, then four Martians.

They strode with enormous steps towards the river.

With the Martians you have these very impressive heat rays,

against which contemporary weapons were making no impact at all.

The British soldiers trying to stop their advance

just failed completely and were destroyed.

The water turns hot, and begins to boil almost,

and then the narrator feels,

"I must get underwater,

because otherwise, like the other people,

I will be burnt alive, roasted."

I plunged beneath the water at once

and, holding my breath, tried to escape,

pushing people aside to move faster.

When I raised my head above water, steam rose

in a swirling, whitish fog.

The air was nothing but din.

What was new about The War of the Worlds

was the extremely realistic treatment

of what's supposedly a fantastical scenario.

Because it's treated realistically,

it's no longer fantastical at all.

You believe it.

And that's a lesson that would permeate science fiction,

but perhaps even all fiction too.

We read the narrator's logbook

as he recounts his invasion.

And that's a form that makes all the difference.

That's why we're swept along.

Wells' bold choice

was to write a first-person narrative

featuring a philosopher as protagonist.

In any case, he's an intellectual man.

He's clearly someone with a passion for science.

And this character is, I'd say,

an avatar of Wells himself.

You have to imagine at the time

the cultural resistance there would have been

for an author who dared to treat realistically

what would have been considered a children's tale

in the 19th century.

And there were only a handful.

To be clear, only a handful dared to do it.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen

on the illuminated part of the disc,

first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice,

and then by other observers.

I am inclined to think that this blaze

may have been the casting of the huge gun,

in the vast pit sunk into their planet,

from which their shots were fired at us.

He was writing hard science fiction for his day.

He was using the information that he had available to write his story.

The SETI Institute was created

because we wanted a place where researchers

could listen to the sky

and try to understand if we're alone in the universe,

if there are other extraterrestrial civilisations

trying to communicate with us.

Wells really put his finger

on one of the most fascinating questions

for humans in the solar system,

because Mars is fundamentally

the world in the solar system closest to ours.

The idea that Mars is a world apart

where something might have happened.

We can go back to the 17th, 18th century

when Galileo made the first observations

with his telescope

and we realised there were seasons on Mars.

The darker areas were thought to be oceans

because we could see the polar ice caps

changing with the seasons.

So this whole concept began to take shape.

Before Wells there were many stories

imagining extraterrestrials

on other planets.

We were living in an era

dreaming of what was called the plurality of inhabited worlds.

The Moon was imagined to be populated by Selenites.

Often pictured as great bats,

greenish, reddish creatures flying through the skies

and sometimes even vampires.

This is where Wells broke new ground,

by turning his attention to another people: the Martians.

It's linked to the absolute obsession of the time

with this curious red planet.

People truly believed it was Earth's cousin planet,

but more importantly, strange observations had been made.

Schiaparelli, in the late 19th century,

observed Mars for hours when it was in opposition,

night after night,

and began sketching what he saw.

Looking through the telescope,

one could see the small round planet drifting across his field of view.

It seemed so tiny,

faintly marked with transverse bands.

It was 60 million kilometres away.

In those days if you looked at Mars through a telescope,

it appeared to have lines on it.

And everyone assumed that they were channels or canals.

And because of that they assumed that there was life.

A straight line doesn't occur in nature.

The planet is red. So it's a desert.

There's no water left on Mars.

And what they were seeing was a technological construction

by the Martians,

trying to channel water from the polar ice caps

to the equatorial regions.

And the points we see at these canal intersections,

these are oases, where they can live.

This vision is tremendously anthropocentric,

tremendously geocentric,

but it was supported by observations.

It made sense.

So obviously, you then have fiction

building on that

with a brilliant foundation for storytelling.

Yes, the Martians are on a dying world

with only one escape route left:

finding another world elsewhere.

And we're next on the list.

Wells had come to Woking Hill.

He had been advised by doctors to move out of London

because of its polluted atmosphere.

He used to walk and cycle around Woking quite a lot.

And he did this sort of

identification of places which could come into the story

so that readers could follow the events on a map

and follow the Martians from Woking

to Weybridge, to London and so forth.

Then came the night when the first meteor fell.

It was seen in the early morning passing over Winchester.

A great many people in Berkshire, in Surrey

and in Middlesex

must have seen its passage.

We're in the middle of Horsell Common,

which is where Wells set the Martian landing.

And in a way this obviously became an iconic site

because of the way in which it started the novel and the invasion.

So this is really the site of the first real battle

between extraterrestrials and people on Earth.

At the centre, driven deep into the skin of our old planet

like a poisoned splinter, was this cylinder.

The thing lay there,

almost entirely buried in the sand.

It was 25 to 30 metres in diameter.

"Extraterrestrial"

meant nothing to most observers.

Boy, you could fry eggs on that thing!

RAY HARRYHAUSEN TEST FOR AN UNMADE FILM - 1949

The top of the cylinder continued to unscrew from within.

Within me, fear and curiosity battled for supremacy.

I believe everyone expected to see a man emerge.

A sudden shiver ran through my entire body.

A woman behind me let out a piercing scream.

I remained frozen, eyes fixed ahead.

Those who have never seen living Martians

can scarcely imagine the strange horror of their appearance.

Their singular V-shaped mouth and pointed upper lip.

Their lack of forehead,

the Gorgon-like cluster of tentacles and above all,

the extraordinary intensity of their enormous eyes.

He gives faces to these creatures.

It's hard to imagine them. I was going to say to look at them,

so powerful are the images in this book.

But I have terrifying images

from my first teenage reading of those passages

that showed me the strangeness.

You feel the skin, the texture, so it's something visceral.

We're not in a fable,

we're not dealing with an abstract alien.

And that too is, in a way, revolutionary,

to imagine an alien that lives, that has a beating heart,

that must feed.

And it feeds on human blood.

But above all, this Martian is a mechanical being.

It has built itself an enormous tripod device

to move about.

It was a monstrous machine,

with mechanical movements and metallic clanging,

with long flexible, gleaming tentacles

swaying noisily.

As it passed near me,

the monster let out a violent,

deafening howl that rose above the thunder.

The tripods are like exoskeletons.

Today, if we had to describe the tripods,

we'd call them "exoskeletons".

They're compared to boilers, to trains.

There's also the use of a heat ray,

there's black smoke.

We might wonder about the underlying critique

that could relate to Wells' contemporary world.

It's set in an industrial age

and this was a time

when technology was frightening,

and there is technophobia

ultimately in this novel.

For the late 19th-century public,

there was real anxiety

about the rapid mechanisation of the world,

which hadn't yet been properly,

I'd say, theorised or tested.

This would be tested to the full

during the First World War in 1914,

when suddenly people realised

what this mechanisation meant.

It also meant the possibility of mass destruction.

Wells sensed this fear among the English

who watched their countryside disappear

beneath the advance of dark, grimy factories.

This was a deep trauma in the English psyche.

These tripods, I think,

also evoke factory chimneys.

These things that darken the sky and invade us.

The English Industrial Revolution

wasn't the gentlest process

for its people

and so, in a way, they lived through the end of a world.

People lived without knowing why,

worked because they were told to work,

trapped in social classes they couldn't escape.

This was an era with very little social mobility.

Wherever you're born, you stay there.

Wells dreamed of political renewal,

he championed education for all.

He also had quite interesting ideas

on women's emancipation.

He wanted to create family allowances

for women with children.

Early on, as a student, he embraced English socialism,

listening to the Fabians, a progressive organisation

seeking to reform society.

Before we judge the Martians too harshly,

we must remember the ruthless

and barbarous destruction wrought

by our own species.

The Tasmanians were, within 50 years,

entirely swept from the world

in a war of extermination waged by Europeans.

Are we such apostles of mercy

as to complain if the Martians

warred in the same spirit?

Many now reread this novel

through a decolonial lens.

This is because,

just as the Martians invade us,

we've wiped out peoples, waged wars of conquest,

we've put people in human zoos.

So it's very hard to judge harshly

these Martians who are merely reproducing

expansionist impulses

that humans have shown in the past.

In Wells, I think there's a form of disgust

because Wells was a pacifist, a progressive.

And he sees an England that is neither,

and he longs for the end, not of the world, but of a system.

Is peace possible in the world anymore?

I think it is.

He always had this London accent.

And his voice was very high-pitched.

But you hear his voice and think...

It's very unusual, and he had this Cockney accent.

If they did so,

they would not only make peace in the air,

but they would lay the foundations for a universal peace.

I think he was on the defensive

because he came up against the dreaded British class system.

Wells was working class.

His father was a shopkeeper,

his mother was a housekeeper, a servant.

And Wells became a highly intelligent spokesman.

And so when he started going off to mix with other writers

they were all a bit, sort of... You know?

They teased him.

There are very few photographs of Wells as a child, but there's one.

He must be seven or eight years old.

He's at a photographer's. It's quite a significant moment

because it wasn't every day in his social circle

that such a thing could be arranged.

My brain was not particularly good,

but it was a precocious brain

and I was put in classes with boys older than myself

until the end of my brief school career.

Once he learned to read, he wanted to read everything

and so any book that fell into his hands,

he would take it.

Wells was what we'd call today

a class defector, quite simply.

He believed that education was truly

the only possible lever for emancipation.

The day I arrived at the Normal School of Science

and took the lift to the biology laboratory,

that day was a great day.

Gradually he managed to work his way into education,

and went to a college

which is now called Imperial College London,

an important scientific place.

Charles Darwin had been dead for barely a year.

That year I spent in Thomas Huxley's class

was the most instructive of my life.

Darwin and Huxley were both great men.

They were both powerful liberators of the mind.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

He proved that all living species

descended from one another

and that man descended from the ape.

All of Victorian England shuddered in horror.

One lady cried out,

"Let us hope this isn't true.

But if it is, let us pray it never becomes known."

Darwin discovered we are the product of evolution

and therefore we weren't created

amongst all living beings

to be both central and superior

to all these creatures.

And that's deeply unsettling.

It would have a profound influence on Wells.

Through Darwin, in fact,

Wells found a way to question the nature and function of the Martians

but also, the main theme of this novel ultimately,

humanity's place in this new pyramid of life

which now extended into space.

And that's exactly what Wells tells us.

It's not the destruction of the globe in a burst of flames,

it's simply mankind's realisation

that they're no longer dominant in the pyramid of life.

We tend to think Wells was just a novelist,

but actually, he started out

writing popular science articles that aimed to be

accessible to everyone,

but also quite adventurous

in the ideas they put forward,

even though they were always scientifically grounded.

If we wanted to find a possible source

for Wells' Martians, I think we'd need to look

at one of his 1894 articles

which imagines what human beings might become

in the year one million.

He describes a human being

reduced to an enormous brain.

In the future, man is destined to change

until he finally abandons his human form.

Everything purely animal in him will undoubtedly

disappear.

Thus, he will possess

a considerably larger brain

and a more delicate body than at present.

One aspect of the Martians is they represent

this hyper-Darwinian man

evolved to become

virtually a brain and tentacles,

a brain and hands.

It actually offers an image

of humanity's future in a striking way.

Wells wasn't a novice at all

when he published The War of the Worlds.

He'd brought out The Time Machine in 1895.

Wells was such an innovative mind.

By far my favourite is The Time Machine.

He invented the idea of time travel stories.

It's even more Darwinian than The War of the Worlds.

Humanity literally splits

into two branches in the distant future.

Two post-human branches.

This shows Wells' obsession

with man's biological future.

The following year he released The Island of Dr Moreau

about strange grafts, xenografts

between animal and man,

I'll show you who I am and what I am!

and also The Invisible Man the following year,

in which it is possible

to make a human body imperceptible.

How do you like that?

Most people look at The War of the Worlds

and think it's the work of an established writer.

And often you see pictures of Wells in his forties and fifties.

In fact, when he published the War of The Worlds he was only 28.

In those days they tended to publish a story

in a serial form in a magazine, and then publish it as a book.

This happened to The War of the Worlds as well.

Then I saw a long metallic tentacle.

It had advanced a metre or two into the room now.

I cowered at the far end, trembling violently.

Had the Martian seen me?

Many people described it as a page turner.

You couldn't put it down,

you just read it from start to finish.

I stood there, motionless,

stunned and dazzled by the jets of light.

This blazing death, this invisible sword of flame

swept in its arc

and I saw it was coming towards me.

The book was a bestseller.

He was an immediate sensation.

He became a personality very quickly.

And it was translated quite quickly into many other languages.

It went into French in 1900, and German in 1901 for example.

So it was soon spreading Wells' name.

AMAZING STORIES - H.G. WELLS

In the 1920s

an American magazine was started to publish science fiction,

and the first thing they did was they printed

all the stuff that Wells had written.

And they had their own writers, and so they would imitate him.

And then the people who followed them imitated them.

And so, over the years

you have this development of science fiction which

at its roots was H.G. Wells.

Wells, for me, is the brilliant inventor

of science fiction.

Nothing's been invented since Wells. We've embellished,

we've used data provided by technology

and modern science, but Wells invented everything.

Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake.

Now it's another one, and another one and another one...

They look like tentacles to me.

I can see the thing's body now. It's large, it's as large as a bear.

Orson Welles' adaptation, first of all, I find incredible.

He applies to the letter

what a science fiction author does.

You present it as if it were real.

Something's happening...

Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific...

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing

I've ever witnessed.

It's no wonder that the broadcast on 30th October 1938

by Orson Welles became absolutely legendary.

This is largely due to the very particular year

in which it was broadcast.

You have to imagine it's October 1938,

just one month after Czechoslovakia was ceded

under the Munich Agreement.

There was already widespread fear

about Nazi expansionism.

I'm speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, NY City.

The bells you hear are ringing to warn people

to evacuate the city as Martians approach.

Our army is wiped out.

This may be the last broadcast.

We'll stay here to the end.

This was the first time

that this text can have seemed so terrifying.

It gave the book another dimension

and perhaps secured its place in posterity.

It really made Orson Welles' reputation.

And I think it's probably the most famous of the adaptations,

it really made a big impact on American society.

You have to remember that anyone tuning in

part of the way through wouldn't have heard

Orson Welles say that this was a radio adaptation

of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

The very next day there were complaints

against Orson Welles

that he'd overstepped the mark

because it was hard to tell where reality ended and fiction began.

We're deeply shocked and deeply regretful

about the results of last night's broadcast.

Radio is new and we are learning about the effect it has on people.

The War of the Worlds paradigm, this kind of standard,

is very useful for adapting to contemporary tastes,

I'd almost say to the anxieties

of the moment and resurging periodically.

Fire!

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS GEORGE PAL - 1953

Those shells can't get through to them.

They've put out some sort of electromagnetic covering,

a protective blister.

George Pal's version is essentially built

around the fear of communism.

It's a film of post-war America,

of the Cold War.

This template became the hallmark of many productions

and particularly sci-fi B-movies of the era,

like Invaders from Mars or countless others.

These aliens were ultimately communism

at its final stage,

invading the land of the free.

Come on out. We're friends.

That's right!

- We welcome you! - We're friends!

When they said 'red planet',

they knew it would provoke something

among an audience that, day in, day out,

associated red with danger.

You can't overstate how traumatic Sputnik was.

Suddenly there's a Russian weapon floating

above Americans' heads and they can do nothing about it.

Thus the panic spread like a roaring wave

across the world's greatest city

at dawn on Monday morning.

Never before in history

had such a mass of humanity been set in motion.

People were trampled and crushed.

It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS GEORGE PAL - 1953

By three, people were being trampled and crushed in Bishopsgate Street,

and the policemen were breaking the heads

of the people they were called out to protect.

It set the standard

for what disaster films would become.

Suddenly the social order collapses,

you have mass panic,

cities emptied of their populations,

mass exoduses that would also be realities

in the context of world wars,

but which cinema, particularly

Hollywood cinema, would exploit

to the hilt in the decades that followed.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS STEVEN SPIELBERG - 2005

Spielberg's film

is purely post-9/11 cinema.

Spielberg was revisiting a trauma that was still very raw

in the public consciousness.

That sudden aspect, the shock element

is brilliantly captured in the film.

And above all, that sense of helplessness

that Americans felt being struck so suddenly

in all their power and arrogance.

In The War of the Worlds

the threat comes from where you least expect it.

And 9/11 was exactly that. A total shock.

And that shock is there from the first novel,

it's there in all the adaptations.

It seems to me that what we call Martian culture

truly transcended the novel itself

and even film adaptations

to colonise our pop culture.

Take Mickey Mouse, for instance,

or Superman or Spider-Man, who at some point

have all faced the tripods

on the battlefield, in the world of comic books.

Original stories are very, very, very rare. Extremely rare.

Nearly 99% of all the stories

are copies.

And you have a genius will come.

MARS ATTACKS! TIM BURTON - 1996

H.G. Wells had a fantastic idea.

And the whole of science fiction grew out of that idea.

I wanted the film to be a comedy, really.

Science fiction is all about philosophy and politics, polemics...

So it was a critique of American society,

but it wasn't malicious. Not really.

I set myself a challenge

of killing every character in an interesting way.

The first lady,

I liked that one...

The shrinking ray...

And then the foot.

Tim came up with the death of the president. That was the best one.

The hand scurrying around the back,

and coming through.

I noticed that the film has become a kind of cult film

that people watch over and over and over.

And the reason they go back to it

is because they feel liberated by the film.

Because all the authority figures get killed,

and it's the ordinary people who benefit from it.

I must confess the sight of all this armament,

all this preparation, greatly excited me.

My imagination became belligerent,

and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways;

something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back.

I can best express my state of mind by saying

that I wanted to be in at the death.

I remember as a child

I was obsessed with fighting and with killing.

You could theorise that it's to do

with the need to control, to hunt,

to provide and to fight and defend and to face death.

And so an invasion, that's the worst thing, isn't it?

So how do you deal with it?

In a fold of marshy ground,

I found myself amongst a multitude of little frogs.

I stopped a moment to watch them,

drawing from their determination to live a lesson for myself.

Suddenly, I had the sensation that someone was watching me.

Turning round sharply,

I saw a man armed with a cutlass.

His face was black and filthy. I recognised him at once.

"You're the artilleryman who was hiding in my garden."

The artilleryman is the voice of reason and rationality.

He is rooted in the present and refuses to dream.

We've got to fix ourselves up

according to the new state of affairs.

That's how I figure it out.

It isn't quite according to what a man wants for his species,

but it's about what the facts point to.

And that's the principle I acted upon.

We don't know enough. We've got to learn before we've got a chance.

And we've got to live and keep independent

while we learn.

They defeated the greatest power in the world in a couple of days,

walked right over us.

And these are only the first, they'll keep coming.

This is not a war any more

than there's war between man and maggots.

This is an extermination.

In the dialogue between the narrator and the artilleryman,

there's an extremely important line.

The artilleryman tells the narrator, "But wait,

you don't understand.

There never was a war."

The book is called The War of the Worlds

and the guy says to him, "It never was a war,

any more than there's a war

between man and ants."

So under these conditions, what happens next?

And there he imagines a world with the Martians.

It isn't all of us that are made for wild beasts.

And that's what it's got to be.

Those who stop obey orders.

And we form a band - able-bodied, clean-minded men.

We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in.

Weaklings go out again.

They ought to be willing to die.

It's a sort of disloyalty, after all,

to live and taint the race.

Everyone will fight for survival

and the strongest will survive

while others become pets

or die, and that's for the best.

It's still Darwinism.

You have to fight to survive

and that also applies between individuals of the same species.

He was interested in people, he was a humanist.

The trouble was Wells was not a democrat.

And his idea was that he would sort things out

on behalf of the ordinary man.

Then say, "There you are, I've sorted it out".

He wouldn't consult them.

"What do you want?"

You just give it to them, and of course it's doomed to failure.

The fact is that the scenario we see in Wells' book

does show

the dark side of the human psyche.

It's always this idea of combat,

this idea of destruction, this idea of constant struggle

that's probably very deeply rooted in us.

Even though humanity began as small groups

that didn't interact much with each other,

we know that when human communities

did begin to meet,

it rarely went very well.

It's always primitive instinct that emerges.

And that's where Wells' novel becomes fascinating.

Because Wells' Martians are ourselves.

They're a projection of ourselves.

It's this battle between the forces of light and darkness

and these two aspects of the human psyche.

And it's always the same story.

It's humanity confronted with itself.

He inspired people with a realisation.

The trouble is people don't like change.

They like things as they were, even the bad things.

The heritage is awful.

I think the First World War was for him

like a revelation.

It awakened him in the same way as The War of the Worlds,

he wanted the book to wake people up,

and I think it was a decisive turning point for him.

He began to really question how to prevent

another catastrophe like this from happening.

Gradually, fiction would take a back seat.

It was as if he lost interest in it.

There's a quote by him,

he said, "There's no point adding

imaginary catastrophes to the real ones.

The game is up."

The game is up.

After 1900/1910

he began to write about international affairs

and to present himself as a public intellectual

who wrote about big topics,

and also travel the world meeting important people.

He met Lenin, Stalin, both Roosevelts.

He was well connected in Hollywood with people like

Charlie Chaplin and so on.

And I think he saw himself as a person who knew about things

and could provide a useful window on world events.

You asked me what I think about America coming into the war.

Well, I speak without any authority,

as an ordinary British citizen.

And to me it seems very desirable

that you shouldn't come into the war at the present time.

He abandoned his role as a futurist

to take on another role, that of prophet.

This was the case with the League of Nations,

which he played a big part in and helped to establish.

He developed what was essentially a political programme

for a world state, 'a universal republic',

as he called it,

that would protect all mankind.

He channelled all his energy into writing essays

to try and support this idea

and his project, which he believed in passionately,

but which sadly remained a utopia.

He wrote a book called The War in the Air about 1930.

And he envisaged a foreign force - he didn't said they were Germans,

but like the Nazis -

who invaded England and bombed all the cities.

That book came out, was published, and then a few years later reissued.

And he wrote a foreword.

By this time WWII was going on, and London was being bombed,

and Paris had fallen.

And he said, "When I wrote the book,

I told you so, you damned fools."

After I had parted from the artilleryman,

I went down the hill and by the High Street

across the bridge to Fulham.

The red weed was tumultuous,

and nearly choked the bridge roadway.

Whenever these extraordinary plants encountered a watercourse,

they grew to gigantic proportions

and became incomparably fertile.

Their titanic growth had choked the rivers

which had overflowed.

The Martians effectively win, London is destroyed.

Then the fighting stops.

And the city is silent, except for this wailing noise.

And our hero goes to investigate.

And he realises that the Martians thought of everything:

they have powerful weapons,

they were ruthless and brilliant,

but they didn't realise about bacteria.

So they imbibe something like the flu virus or COVID-19 or something.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS STEVEN SPIELBERG - 2005

And they all died.

You can't beat science, basically.

If the science is against you, science will always win.

Atop Primrose Hill stood a Martian,

upright and motionless, struck down by a death

that seemed utterly incomprehensible to it.

Its system was unprepared.

Killed, after all human means of defence had failed,

by the tiniest creatures that Providence, in its wisdom,

had placed upon this earth.

The great twist in the story

is that man doesn't actually triumph

over the Martians.

It's another entity entirely

that we never thought could be the hero.

It's the microbes.

What does that say about mankind?

We are a grain of sand,

somewhat ridiculed in the ecosystem of life,

which is constantly being renegotiated.

The ecological reading is,

first of all, it's obvious now.

We could have seen it earlier

and perhaps that's why it resonates today

where we sense a world coming to an end.

With something almost prescient,

helping us understand

that the Martians came to see us

because they too caused

a mass extinction,

a collapse of biodiversity on their own planet.

So here we have a work from 1898

that speaks to us about extremely modern subjects.

And so the question now is

whether we're capable of acting so that Wells' book

becomes more of a warning than a prophecy.

From Primrose Hill stretched the great metropolis.

Those who have only seen London veiled in its dark, smoky fogs

can hardly imagine the beauty

of its silent desert of houses.

When I clearly understood that the threat had not been fulfilled,

that once again men would walk these streets

and that this vast dead city, so dear to me,

would regain its life and wealth,

I felt such emotion that I began to weep.

Perhaps the Martians have found on the planet Venus

a safer colony.

If they could reach Venus,

nothing prevents us supposing the same might be possible

for mankind,

when the slow cooling of the sun

renders this earth uninhabitable,

as it surely will.

Perhaps life, which began here below,

shall continue upon our sister planet.

Will we have to conquer it? It's a distant dream.

This is exactly the question

we face today.

Earth's in trouble, so we put a few people

in our spaceships,

do what Wells' Martians did, migrate to Mars.

That's Elon Musk's argument.

We behave like locusts.

In fields.

Once we've stripped one field bare,

we move to the next.

We haven't escaped our primitive instincts,

even though our technology

would allow us to feed ourselves

and be happy as humanity.

But the human psyche catches up with us every time.

Why does the most intelligent species,

the most technologically advanced on this planet

act in a way that's self-destructive?

Because, whatever the case, it is self-destructive.

Over a century ago H.G. Wells devoted part of his life

and writings to warning humanity.

Since then, others have also used images

to sound the alarm.

In 1990,

astrobiologist Carl Sagan turned Voyager's camera

back to photograph Earth.

This image had an enormous impact on the scientific community

and beyond.

It's known as the Pale Blue Dot.

40 years ago, Carl Sagan gave us a key.

Okay, so we disagree on religion.

We might not even agree on what's important

for humanity's future.

But there's something we can agree on.

This is our planet seen from space, so tiny.

This pale blue dot seen from Neptune's orbit.

A pixel in an image.

When we look at this pixel in space

and think

of how many rivers of blood that generals and tyrants

have spilled throughout history

just to be, for a brief moment,

masters of a fraction of a pixel.

We live in extraordinary times.

After all I've said,

we live in extraordinary times

because this era confronts us with

all the choices, all the decisions

that a mature civilisation must make.

IN MEMORY OF CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

A FILM WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CYRIL LEUTHY