In 1938, Orson Welles produced a version of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells (not related), for an American radio station. His company, Mercury Theater, had already dramatized several books, such as The Count of Monte Christo and Dracula, but now Welles decided on a new approach.
At that time, radio was still a powerful new medium. Big radio networks like CBS and NBC had only been running for about ten years. They were nervous and nervous times. Storm clouds were gathering over Europe, as Churchill put it. Britain was less than a year away from the most desperate fight for survival in its long history, and most Americans felt that sooner or later they too would be involved.
Americans were getting used to the dramatic stories unfolding on the radio. The first live broadcast from a real war zone occurred in 1932, when a reporter brought the sounds of a battle royal from Spain into people’s homes. Then there was the mystery of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped son, which went on for several months. To this day there are some unanswered questions related to this case. In 1937 there was the fatal crash of the Hindenberg airship, described by Herbert Morrison of Chicago’s WLS station in a recording released the following day. “Oh the flames, four or five hundred feet in the sky, it’s a terrible crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and the flames now and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite the tie post. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers, ”he says, before pausing for a few minutes, overwhelmed by horror.
It was at this nervous moment that Orson Welles hit the US airwaves with his new production. Welles had updated the story from his cozy late Victorian English setting to contemporary New Jersey, presenting it as a series of increasingly apocalyptic news reports. Listeners settling into what they thought was a dance music program suddenly heard it interrupted by a report of several explosions of ‘glowing gas’ on the planet Mars, followed, after a few more minutes of music, by a interview with a ‘professor’ at the Princeton Observatory, assuring everyone that there was nothing to worry about.
From here, the story gets wilder, as reports begin to pour in of a Martian invasion in full swing. The Martians had landed, for reasons best known to them (and Welles), in the quiet rural village of Grovers Mill, and were fanning out in the direction of New York City, spreading death and destruction as they went. The realistic effect was reinforced by the use of authentic place names along the route.
The result was more surprising than anyone, including Orson, could have predicted. It so happens that about half of the audience tuned in that night, which is why they missed the short introduction, explaining that what they were listening to was just a radio play. Thousands of people panicked. Roads were blocked with people and cars. Some people hid in basements, some wrapped their heads in wet towels to escape the poison gas, some took up their weapons and declared that they would help defend Grovers Mill.
Public services were flooded. A man called the Bronx Police Headquarters and told the cop at the desk, “They’re bombing New Jersey!” “How do you know?” asked Patrolman Morrison. “I heard it on the radio. Then I went to the roof and I could see the smoke from the bombs!”
It would be a cheap answer to laugh at the unsophisticated reaction of those Americans, almost seventy years ago, when they confused science fiction with reality, but in those anxious days, who knew what would be possible? Welles later claimed that it was not his intention to cause mass panic, and there is no reason not to believe it. Anyway, he must have known that he was playing on a well-established fantasy.
The fascination with out-of-world activities goes back a long time if you think of the Greek gods as the first space travelers, and Icarus was one of the first fatalities when he flew too close to the sun with his wings of wax and feathers, after having been warned. against her for her father, Daedalus. As we all know, the wax melted and fell into the sea …
Science fiction in its modern form began with Jules Verne and HG Wells. In From the Earth to the Moon, which was written as a kind of travel journal, Verne has his space capsule with his three-man crew fired at the moon from a cannon. This story influenced most of the pioneers of the original space. Although not as educated as HG Wells, he used actual engineering analysis to arrive at the design of his cannon and manned lunar projectile, and at the time of the Apollo missions it was recognized that he made a number of correct engineering predictions.
Science fiction literature really took off in the 1950s and 1960s. CSLewis wrote his ‘Interplanetary Trilogy’ in 1953; Travel to Venus, that horrible force and off the silent planet. These had a strong Christian and moral theme. Lewis, originally from Ireland, moved to England and eventually became an Oxford professor, so it is understandable that his fiction was a bit shaky in science. But it was an exception. Many science fiction writers of the time were scientists, engineers, or mathematicians, sometimes all three. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov (Me, Robot), and Arthur C. Clarke are just three of the many that come to mind. Ray Bradbury is one of a kind, for his beautifully crafted poetic images of lost and ruined civilizations on the Red Planet.
Today there is less distance between science fiction and science than before. Arthur C. Clarke is so respected in scientific circles that he has had several craters named after him on the moon. Many of Clarke’s ideas have been used by space engineers. For example, in 1963 he wrote a story called Windjammer, or The Wind of the Sun, in which space vehicles had enormously wide sails, made of extremely thin material. The idea was that they would be propelled between the planets by “solar winds” or the pressure of the sun. The rate of acceleration would be small, but a ship would eventually reach speeds close to the speed of light, using no fuel at all.
Some time ago I read that the Russians had taken up the challenge and were building a spaceship based on Clarke’s idea. As I write, this vehicle has simply not been launched due to the failure of the initial stage of the rocket, not the space wings themselves, but such is the interest in Clarke’s concept that programs are being prepared in the US. , Japan and Europe. .
Another of Arthur C. Clarke’s ideas was that of a tower that stretched out into space, as a kind of docking point for spaceships. This idea is also receiving serious consideration.
NASA’s entrepreneurial approach to space exploration from the 1960s onwards has taken some of the mystery out of local space travel and affected the popularity of science fiction literature. The emphasis has shifted to movies. Again Arthur C. Clarke showed the way with the classic 2001. Since then we have had Star Wars, Close Encounters, ET, Alien, Independence Day and of course Star Trek. I should also mention Contact, the book and movie by Carl Sagan, a scientist and writer who left us too soon. He was largely responsible for NASA’s search program for alien radio signals. And now, to close the circle, we have a new version of War of the Worlds …
Seventy years later, it is true that we could not be fooled by Welles’ radio work, but technology advances at such a rate that we are no longer really sure what is possible and what is not. Antimatter, antigravity, spell particles, alien abduction, bring it up, the truth is out there. Personally, I won’t be surprised if they discover a way to travel faster than the speed of light. Warp factor two, Mr. Sulu, and see you in the morning.