Wells’s hypothesis was correct, as we all have learned by now. The Martians have perished in mid-conquest, victims of our terrestrial bacteria. No one has seen a living one anywhere in the past two weeks. We fugitive humans have returned to our homes; the wheels of civilization have begun to turn once more.
We are safe, yes—and yet we are not. Whether the Martians will return, fortified now against our microorganisms and ready to bend us once more to their wishes, we cannot say. But it is clear now to me that the little sense of security that we of Earth feel, most especially we inhabitants of England in the sixty-third year of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, is a pathetic illusion. Our world is no impregnable fortress. We stand open to the unpredictable sky. If Martians can come one day, Venusians may come another, or Jovians, or warlike beings from some wholly unknown star. The events of these weeks have been marvelous and terrible, and without shame I admit having derived great rewards even from my fear and my exertions; but we must all be aware now that we are at great risk of a reprise of these dark happenings. We have learned, now, that we are far from being the masters of the cosmos, as we like to suppose. It is a bitter lesson to be given at the outset of this glorious new century.
I discussed these points with Wells when he called here yesterday. He was in complete agreement.
And, as he was taking his leave, I went on, somewhat hesitantly, to express to him the other thought that had been forming in my mind all this past week. “You said once,” I began, “that you had had some scheme in mind, even before the coming of the Martians, for writing a novel of interplanetary invasion. Is that still your intent now that fantasy has become fact, Wells?”
He allowed that it was.
“But it would not now be,” I said, “your usual kind of fantastic fiction, would it? It would be more in the line of reportage, would you not say? An account of the responses of certain persons to the true and actual extreme event?”
“Of course it would, of necessity,” he said. I smiled expressively and said nothing. And then, quickly divining my meaning, he added: “But of course I would yield, cher maître, if it were your intention to—”
“It is,” I said serenely.
He was quite graceful about it, all in all. And so I will set to work tomorrow. The Ambassadors may perhaps be the grandest and finest of my novels, but it will have to wait another year or two, I suppose, for there is something much more urgent that must be written first.
[James’s notebooks indicate that he did not actually begin work on his classic novel of interplanetary conflict, The War of the Worlds, until the 28th of July, 1900. The book was finished by the 17th of November, unusually quickly for James, and after serialization in The Atlantic Monthly (August-December, 1901) was published in England by Macmillan and Company in March, 1902 and in the United States by Harper & Brothers one month later. It has remained his most popular book ever since and has on three occasions been adapted for motion pictures. Wells never did write an account of his experiences during the Martian invasion, though those experiences did, of course, have a profound influence on his life and work thereafter.
—The Editor.]