How can we compare facts in the novel with reality?
How does Wells’ compare the Martian invasion to British colonialism? In the chapter number 7, there’s a paragraph in which the protagonist says “They are dangerous, because no doubt they are mad with terror. Perhaps they expected to find no living things – certainly no intelligent living things. A shell in the pit, if the worst comes to the worst, will kill them all.”
He is saying that Martians are afraid of them, and that if they show a violent conduct they will respond in the same way. The same happened when the Britain colonised other countries or places, the people who lived there was also afraid and if that people did something which seemed offensive for the colonisers, they were killed.
The novel’s plot is the destructive invasion of some aliens who land in the earth. The symbolic plot is a denunciation to our world, and how human think and act. It would synthesize the security and vanity with which the auto satisfied humanity thinks it’s the most advanced society that exists.
The catastrophe explained in the novel is bigger due to the combination of the human curiosity and Martian aggressiveness. It was a historic moment of prevailing colonisations and Wells said that before judging, we should remember that humans also have destroyed and annihilate species, animals and what they considered inferior humans.
No writer before the 19th century had expressed a thought of the possibility that far from the intellectual life in the earth, other intellectual lives, in case of existing, had evolved above the human level. In the first pages of The War of the World we can read this idea; he was the first to say out loud what he thought about this human vanity. For sure we don’t still know if those other lives exist, or if they are more intelligent than we are, but the fact that the possibility is there, is what pulled off that clam confidence in our future.
There is a writer, Vicente López, specialised in Wells’ works that understands The War of the Worlds as a narrative argument about the humility of humans, and not as a prophecy, that is how was understood by most of the 19th century society.