The Land Ironclads, by HG Wells
It is tempting to focus on HG Wells’ prescience in this story of trench to tank warfare to the exclusion of all else. It was written, after all, twelve years before Europe was bogged down in the mire of WWI, and fifteen years before tanks made their first appearance on the military stage – and this at a time when military experts believed old tactics and warfare would continue – but Wells’ foresight is the easy route into this tale, and for me the least interesting.
Politically, the story sets itself squarely in the realm of Colonial criticism, perhaps even anti-Colonialism. From this direction, the land ironclads and other technologies are important as signifiers of the “invaders” rather than as the potential creations of science, just as the cavalry and adherence to old rules of warfare are signifiers of the “defenders.” It is the war correspondent, however, whose observations are the most significant. Which side he comes from is left intentionally vague, and it is entirely possible he represents a neutral nation or peoples merely watching the battle unfold, but it is through his privileged eyes that we see the defenders as “other” in the Orientalism sense; those of us reading it, then, are presumed to be part of the othering, to be someone like the war correspondent, perhaps even to be on the side of the invaders (although this could simply be because we are now, as Wells’ readers were then, most often on the side of the invaders).
Click on this link to read a story here .
Moreover, beyond its anti-Colonialism, The Land Ironclads works as a criticism of journalism, delivering surprisingly relevant connections to a today Wells surely never imagined, a time of soundbytes and platitudes delivered on social media. He is not looking through his crystal ball to our world of Facebook and Twitter, but Wells’ commentary that “journalism curdles all one’s mind to phrases” and the constant dodging and weaving of the war correspondent’s attitudes and observations is reflective of the input we receive from our journalists (and increasingly one another without journalistic pretension) in our millennial reality.
Click on this link to listen to an audio-story here.
All told, The Land Ironclads is chilling opening to the Oxford Book of Science Fiction stories, offering, as it does, a perfect example of Sci-Fi’s greatest strength (at least in my estimation): its ability to tell us not what we could be or will be but precisely what we are.
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