Castle Aching

[Martin S-C]

13 hours ago, James Harrison said:

I always thought War of the Worlds was supposed to be set in the near future, from the time it was written. On the steampunk forum I frequent there's been a bit of furore that the BBC are setting their go at it in the Edwardian period, as "it's not Victorian!", which rather overlooks the first paragraph of the novel. "In the opening years of the twentieth century"....

Been a while since I read the book but I thought the line was "...in the last years of the nineteenth century..." Or am I confusing Richard Burton's spoken line with Wells' written one?

And the BEEB are making a WotW series? Oh wow, awesome. I read the book when I was about 8 or 9 and completely fell in love with it. Still my favourite read.

[Skinnylinny]

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water." 

 

That's the book that I've got on my Kindle, anyway!

[Edwardian]

Agree, hence the question, how far, if at all, ahead of those "last years of the nineteenth century" do we assume the novel is set? First published, IIRC in serial form in 1897, it can hardly be set in the past or exactly contemporary, as it's very much a "this is what I imagine is about to happen" scenario. 

[Nearholmer]

Brilliant opening, isn’t it?

 

I don’t always do splendidly well when it comes to books that I recommend to my young son, but this one he was riveted by, from that very first paragraph - he even took it to school and read it at break-times.

 

 

[Hroth]

As the epitome of scene setting I've always preferred

 

Quote

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford, by Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton.

 

As for old HG, Its clear that if you went out and did a voxpop in the centre of London in the last years of the nineteenth century, then indeed people would say "Martian Intelligences studying us?  Cor blimy, Nahhhh!!!" And as it would take about a year for those fiendish intelligences to get from Mars to Earth, it could well be the early years of the twentieth century before they started making a nuisance of themselves on the heathlands around Woking.

 

 

Edited March 28, 2019 by Hroth
I can't spell, what is WRONG with me???

[Edwardian]

I've quoted this before, so apologies, but as Toby Frost had it:

 

H. G. Wells exaggerated terribly, but they landed all right.  The thing is, they're incredibly vulnerable to disease and they dropped dead as soon as they came into contact with Surrey.  One of them got as far as Egham before he keeled over, but then, nobody likes Egham very much.

 

... Jeff Wayne tried to blow the lid off it back in the twentieth century, but weakened his case by doing it through a rock opera. That's always a mistake.

[Regularity]

Egham leads to Staines...

[Northroader]

I’ve been in the Staines Wetherspoons, but didn’t see any Martians. That was the only thing that was missing.

[Edwardian]

2 minutes ago, Northroader said:

I’ve been in the Staines Wetherspoons, but didn’t see any Martians. That was the only thing that was missing.

 

Ironic, considering Tim's Martin's belief in fiction, indeed, fantasy.  

[Martin S-C]

As Wells wrote in 1897 that his "Martians were studying us in the last years of the 19thc", that doesn't limit the War of the Worlds to the Victorian era at all, in fact it almost certainly puts it square into the Edwardian era which began only 4 years after he was writing. I very much doubt the Martians had a huge cannon and a dozen giant space-travel shells laying around in case they saw a nearby planet that they would jealously covet, so if they were studying us in the last years of the 19thC then, given the limits of even advanced technology, their cannon and missiles would have need to be constructed and most likely been shot at Earth around 5 to 10 years later at the very least.

Though "last years of the 19th century" could mean anything from the 1890 onwards I suppose.

I'm very comfortable with an attack date of about 1905-1910.

Its all fiction anyway but hardly something for steampunkers to get worked up about.... though I suppose this is the internet when the usual levels of behaviour drop markedly in some quarters.

[Edwardian]

28 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

As Wells wrote in 1897 that his "Martians were studying us in the last years of the 19thc", that doesn't limit the War of the Worlds to the Victorian era at all, in fact it almost certainly puts it square into the Edwardian era which began only 4 years after he was writing. I very much doubt the Martians had a huge cannon and a dozen giant space-travel shells laying around in case they saw a nearby planet that they would jealously covet, so if they were studying us in the last years of the 19thC then, given the limits of even advanced technology, their cannon and missiles would have need to be constructed and most likely been shot at Earth around 5 to 10 years later at the very least.

Though "last years of the 19th century" could mean anything from the 1890 onwards I suppose.

I'm very comfortable with an attack date of about 1905-1910.

Its all fiction anyway but hardly something for steampunkers to get worked up about.... though I suppose this is the internet when the usual levels of behaviour drop markedly in some quarters.

 

I have always felt that the opening lines imply that the narrator is looking back to the last years of the Ninteenth century from a point in the early 1900s.

 

That is entirely consistent with the idea of some time elapsing while the Martians turn their plans into reality and reach the point of arrival. 

 

It's probably more Steampunky to have Regular Troops annihilated whilst wearing scarlet and blue home service uniforms and spikey hats than 1902 home service khaki and caps.  The latter will always be suggestive of the Great War, so works if you see WotW as a Sci-Fi fantasy equivalent. 

 

The excellent and evocative artwork that accompanied the Geoff Wayne album portrayed Thunderchild as a pre-dreadnought battleship or cruiser, IIRC, but in Wells, IIRC, she is specifically a "Torpedo Ram", which was a 'thing' in the 1890s. 

 

[Nearholmer]

Wells was very good on “tech”, I think because most of his journalism was in that area - within one of his stories, he wrote a first-class description of the power station of the city and south London railway, incorporating details of operation that can only have come from talking with the superintendent.

[Martin S-C]

James, I agree.

Kevin - absolutely. In addition, being a socialist, Wells' imagination was always going to be grounded in reality; its how these things are.

Um, okay, politics aside.

 

A fiction work written in the past tense and especially WotW which is written from the perspective of an individual who endured and survived the events described is likely to represent a narrative written after the events - and probably some time after once the writer has gathered his thoughts and a file of letters from friends and relatives and various newspaper accounts and probably re-visited the ground where what he is describing took place.

 

Five years after? Ten?

 

I think the thing that really stamped WotW into my psyche (to speak in stupidly pretentious terms) is how real it seems. How you could open an OS map and look at the places described, or go visit them. It was fiction, but almost fact-fiction. A very powerful story.

[James Harrison]

I've checked my copy of WotW and yep it talks about the close of the nineteenth century.  No idea where I got 'opening years of the twentieth century' from then. 

 

Incidentally a few years ago work took me to Horsham for a few days.  There was one area where, if you squinted a bit, you could almost make out the edge of the pit where all those poor unfortunates came off second best against the heat ray.  

[ChrisN]

48 minutes ago, James Harrison said:

I've checked my copy of WotW and yep it talks about the close of the nineteenth century.  No idea where I got 'opening years of the twentieth century' from then. 

 

Incidentally a few years ago work took me to Horsham for a few days.  There was one area where, if you squinted a bit, you could almost make out the edge of the pit where all those poor unfortunates came off second best against the heat ray.  

 

I have driven by Horsell Common and it is covered in trees now if I remember correctly.  The Martians will not land there in a hurry again!

 

Edited March 28, 2019 by ChrisN

[ChrisN]

6 hours ago, Edwardian said:

I've quoted this before, so apologies, but as Toby Frost had it:

 

H. G. Wells exaggerated terribly, but they landed all right.  The thing is, they're incredibly vulnerable to disease and they dropped dead as soon as they came into contact with Surrey.  One of them got as far as Egham before he keeled over, but then, nobody likes Egham very much.

 

... Jeff Wayne tried to blow the lid off it back in the twentieth century, but weakened his case by doing it through a rock opera. That's always a mistake.

 

I am surprised any got into Egham, I maen, have you tried coming off the M25 a=to go up the A30, it is a complete nightmare.

[Hroth]

32 minutes ago, James Harrison said:

I've checked my copy of WotW and yep it talks about the close of the nineteenth century.  No idea where I got 'opening years of the twentieth century' from then. 

 

Incidentally a few years ago work took me to Horsham for a few days.  There was one area where, if you squinted a bit, you could almost make out the edge of the pit where all those poor unfortunates came off second best against the heat ray.  

 

It gets to the beginning of the twentieth century by the end of the first paragraph!

[Martin S-C]

1 hour ago, James Harrison said:

Incidentally a few years ago work took me to Horsham for a few days.  There was one area where, if you squinted a bit, you could almost make out the edge of the pit where all those poor unfortunates came off second best against the heat ray.  

Horsham? They also set a recon team into Sussex? What book is this? Must buy now...!

There was a TV series about British SF a while back and the presenter was on Horsell common (Surrey - not Sussex!) and there were areas of fairly open ground still. The dude doing the talking called it the ground zero of British Sci-Fi which seems fair.

"...from the railway station came the sound of shunting trains ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. It all seemed so... normal..."

[Nearholmer]

And, it wasn’t just Martian tripods that the LSWR had to contend with.

[Hroth]

Oh Noes!!!

 

The Mr Magoo-oid!

 

I had a silver one with a red Tellytubby style panel, inside of which was a lighter flint which bounced on a spinning wheel, creating an internal shower of sparks as it marched about!

[Nearholmer]

Some interesting Wellsiana here http://wokinghistory.org/onewebmedia/150911.pdf

 

Like you Martin, I got caught by WotW partly because it was all so real. My grandfather was Head Gardener at an estate about five or six miles north of Woking, so, even as a boy, I knew the locale well enough to be able to 'run the film in my head' when reading it ...... we used to ride on the Aldershot & District Traction Company 'bus ('All Tickets Must be Shewn to the Driver') from Woking station, where there was indeed shunting going on, down Chobham Road ....... "The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and Ottershaw about the same time. ".

[south_tyne]

6 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

 

I think the thing that really stamped WotW into my psyche (to speak in stupidly pretentious terms) is how real it seems. How you could open an OS map and look at the places described, or go visit them. It was fiction, but almost fact-fiction. A very powerful story.

 

It's a few years since I last read WotW but I remember that being very striking at the time - Wells goes to huge lengths to almost ram home the 'real life' geography of the area in which the book is set. Probably one of the things that can make it seem so real at times. I imagine this must have been especially the case for folk who read it when first published. 

[James Harrison]

We had to go through Horsell to get to Horsham. And Woking, and a few other towns decimated in the book.

[Hroth]

The early years of the twentieth century were a worrying time in England, what with the Zombie Apocalypse in Norfolk and the Martians in Surrey.  I was just wondering, are there still traces (in the form of new building, etc) of the Martian onslaught, or was the destruction covered up by associating redevelopment with the aftermath of German bombing, and the impact of V weapons?

 

Conspiracy Theorists Want To Know! 

 

(Its about time a programme concerning  these events was broadcast on digital TV...)

[webbcompound]

There is film of the events, you just have to know where to look. And yes they are wearing khaki (and field gray) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bERNcnaT-ko

 

Edited March 29, 2019 by webbcompound