Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The Rainy Day reading programme for the coming month will be dominated by a brilliant new work from Niall Ferguson titled The War Of The World: History's Age of Hatred. This is a huge book (745 pages), so don't be surprised if its themes turn up frequently here in the coming weeks. In his introduction, Ferguson points out that The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, which was published in 1898, is much more than just influential science fiction: "It is also a kind of Darwinian morality tale, and at the same time a work of singular prescience. In the century after the publication of his book, the nightmarish scenes Wells imagined became a reality in cities all over the world — not just in London, where Wells sets his tale, but in Brest-Litovsk, Belgrade and Berlin; in Smyrna, Shanghai and Seoul."

In Wells's work, says Ferguson, people are slow to grasp their vulnerability to the aliens. Then, it is too late, and the massacres begin: "People are slaughtered like beasts. Finally, all that remains are smouldering ruins and piles of desiccated corpses. All of this destruction and death Wells imagined while pedalling around peaceful Woking and Chertsey on his newly-acquired bicycle."

In the 20th century, Martians were not the perpetrators, Ferguson points out. Rather, it was other human beings that did the slaughtering. "It was not a war between worlds that the twentieth century witnessed, but rather a war of the world." The 21st century began with slaughter as well, and the "aliens" also left "smouldering ruins" in their wake, but the difference was that instead of "piles of desiccated corpses" we got thousands of vaporized corpses. And the same would have happened last week, had not the British security services prevented another mass killing. But where is our H.G. Wells? Is he (or she) moving around peaceful Seattle on a newly-acquired "electric personal assistive mobility device", better known as a Segway? Come in, please! Start writing and tell us about the new predators:

"The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar... So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning — the stream of light rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations... Did they dream they might exterminate us?"

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