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Post by lanceradvanced on Feb 1, 2005 15:38:52 GMT
It seems like your blood chemistry and metabolism would have to exactly match the prey organism to make it work - highly unlikely if you're from another world. The other problem might be that digesting food gives a bit of a 'time release' action - food in your stomach is, in effect, 'stored' until it's digested. Any nutrients in 'injected' blood would have to be used comparatively 'immediately'. Perhaps the martians are able to store the nutrients into fat, to be re-introduced into the bloodstream later? In another thread, I droped a mention of the method Games Workshop's Tyranids "Digested" their food, it would seem to be workable for the martians as well. i.e. that the blood/fluid is broken down in the blood stream by freefloating digestive phages. If the martians had such phages, they might even inject them in first, like a spider, and begin the digestive process, and then suck the blood and more out. robk.proboards13.com/index.cgi?board=book&action=display&thread=1105471507 Has anyone read ERB's "Chessmen of Mars"? The Kaldanes and their rykors would seem to be a good model for a proto martian/food biped relationship, before the maritans developed their machines. Marvel Comics did an issue that mixed the plots of "Chessmen and MasterMind of Mars" that may be where Allan Morre got his idea of the Martian "Flesh Sculpting" he introduced in the second LXG series.. |
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Post by Flynn77 on Feb 11, 2005 12:59:50 GMT
To get back to that other point though, the martians do hoot to expel enough air to allow for the sucking (  ) needed for the blood extraction? In fact the writer does say that people mistook this 'hooting' for language. I always pictured the syringe method, and find it the most disturbing!! There is an interesting scene in 'starship troopers' that uses a natural method!! It's more to do with sucking out brains though!! |
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Post by Killraven on Feb 17, 2005 19:33:13 GMT
Its also important from the point of view of expelling any air from the pipette/syringe... after all, they might otherwise suffer from an unexpected embolism...(spelling?)  |
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Post by Herulian Martian on Feb 22, 2005 11:28:52 GMT
Embolism is right. Personally, I think H.G. Wells was obliquely mentioning a natural pipette that the martians have. I think it would be in their v-shaped mouths. The "hooting" that the Martians would make would be to expel air from the now extended pipette, creating a vacuum. The Martians would then pin down the human victim, "bite" him and swiftly drain his blood! Most likely they would first inject from the pipette an anti-coagulent so as to drain off the most amount of blood possible. It would be a very painful and gruesome death for a human.
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Post by Lensman on Feb 25, 2005 1:05:47 GMT
It may be interesting to speculate what the result would be if the Martians had built-in pipettes, or an organic valve into which the pipette could be inserted, with a filtering organ behind it, or something even more extensive which was missed in autopsies... But this is not what Wells said. He clearly said they have no digestive system, period. Once you have any sort of tube designed to bring food into the body, which is not directly connected to the circulatory system but has some sort of intermediary organ, that's a digestive system. Doesn't matter if you call the intermediary organ a "filtering organ" or an intestine. The REAL question is if you can actually sustain yourself simply by injecting someone else's blood into your veins. <snip> It seems like your blood chemistry and metabolism would have to exactly match the prey organism to make it work - highly unlikely if you're from another world. Yes, once you start analyzing it in the light of contemporary medical science the idea falls apart. In addition to the potential for air embolisms, you'd have the potential for deadly imbalance in blood gasses. And if you're getting all your fluid from blood injection, you could have a problem with dehydration under dry or hot conditions. But one can hardly criticize Wells for the lack of medical knowledge available at the time, when the "state of the art" was they understood there were different blood types (in relation to blood transfusions), but didn't understand what the differences were or what caused a bad reaction from mismatched blood types. Among other things, Wells was interested in speculating on the evolution of mankind. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, his article of speculative evolution "The Man of the Year Million" (1893) describes man as "natural selection would ultimately shape him: a creature with a huge head and eyes, delicate hands and a much reduced body, permanently immersed in nutrient fluids". In another article speculating on future evolution, he wrote of "The Advent of the Flying Man," perhaps anticipating the idea of the flying Martians seen in his short story "The Crystal Egg." Trying to analyze Wells' medical/biological science in light of today's science is no more appropriate than criticizing him for using giant cannons to shoot the Martians from Mars to Earth, instead of using chemical rockets achieving a "soft" landing. Yes, in reality his Martians would have been smashed to jelly upon takeoff as well as landing, but so what? If that was good enuff for Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon, no doubt Wells thought it was good enuff for him. In light of what we know today, it's absurd to think any animal could naturally evolve away from having a digestive system. I can imagine if easily-digested food were available over a period of millions of years, our digestive systems might become very simplified, but I can't believe that they would disappear entirely without radical genetic engineering. But again I don't think Wells should be chastized for speculation on evolution, which was at the time a controversial and still relatively new idea. While the degree of scientific accuracy existant in a story is a "game" often played between authors and readers, Wells clearly was more interested in social commentary and speculation on the human condition (including evolution). The science was merely the vehicle for providing-- to quote W.S. Gilbert-- "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” |
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Post by quaderni on Mar 5, 2005 20:59:08 GMT
Lensman - great points, especially about verisimilitude in science fiction.
I say this often, but War of the Worlds has a touch of the supernatural in it - the Martians are telepathic and vampiric, and I don't think these are supposed to be taken in a 'scientific' manner at all (though it is interesting that the Narrator tries to explain these phenomena in scientific terms, rather like Van Helsing tries to understand Dracula, at first, through scientific terms, or how we are supposed to think about Dorian Gray in both genetic and supernatural terms).
One of the staples of late Victorian literature - particularly romantic horror - was the interplay between science and the supernatural, and how these two world-views could co-exist in some instances. This all goes back to Charcot's Salpêtrière clinic in the 1870s and 1880s. His work on hysteria, the occult, and demonology sparked much scientific interest in the supernatural and much 'wonder' about the possible limits of scientific investigation.
Like Durtal in Huysman's _The Damned_ [Là-bas] (1891), who was fascinated by serial killers and Satanism, WOTW perhaps asks us to consider the real possibility of _evil_ in our godless universe.
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Post by Lensman on Mar 6, 2005 3:47:33 GMT
War of the Worlds has a touch of the supernatural in it - the Martians are telepathic and vampiric, and I don't think these are supposed to be taken in a 'scientific' manner at all I completely agree. Wells went out of his way to make the Martians horrific, and therefore completely unsympathetic. He could easily have made the Martians less horrific, firstly by not having them feed off blood-- the "Man of the Year Million" was immersed in nutrient fluid after all-- and secondly by simply not describing them using such horrific adjectives and terms. I find it interesting that Wells would choose to portray the Martians with such horror and disgust. If his main purpose was drawing a parallel to British colonialism's destructive influence on native cultures such as Tasmania, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to make the Martians seem more "like us" to the readers? So why the deliberate horrific elements? Was it just sensationalism, to raise the readership level? Or did he have an artistic/ philosophical reason for doing so? If the reason was to prevent the reader from feeling any sympathy towards them, why? If the "moral" of the story was anti-colonialism, why didn't Wells make them "more like us?" |
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Post by Lensman on Mar 6, 2005 4:01:49 GMT
Like Durtal in Huysman's _The Damned_ [Là-bas] (1891), who was fascinated by serial killers and Satanism, WOTW perhaps asks us to consider the real possibility of _evil_ in our godless universe. "It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men..." WotW, Book 2, Chapter 10. I question that Wells intended the novel to suggest a godless universe. As has been discussed in one or more threads in this forum, Wells had an adverse reaction to the more rabid forms of religious fervor, especially the fanatic Calvanism his mother reputedly tried to indoctrinate him with. But that doesn't mean he didn't believe in Providence or a Divine Creator. |
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Post by quaderni on Mar 7, 2005 3:59:01 GMT
"It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men..." WotW, Book 2, Chapter 10. No, you're quite right to point this out - I'd put it in the 'perhaps' to offer me some shielding. Didn't work, I guess! The ending is always a puzzle to me. In the end, the Narrator comes to accept all the homilies about Victorian morality and its views of god, the universe, and everything. At the same time, it also offers the startling (and even disquieting) evolutionary conclusion: that natural selection, in the end of all the death and struggle, produced something useful, something uniquely terrestrial and that we're supposed to find deeper meaning and solace in this insight. Earth withstood Martians because of a completely random evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps. As for Wells's long-standing religious views, I must express total ignorance, except that he rejected his mother's Calvinism and he's clearly materialistic in his philosophic bent. Et tu, Charles? |
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Post by Lensman on Mar 7, 2005 7:12:46 GMT
Altho religious ideas, and praising God for delivery from the Martians, do figure prominantly at the very end of the novel, certainly before that it is written from a very materialistic point of view, and Wells' low opinion of organized religion is clearly represented in the character of the Curate. Were the epilogue's "hosannas" just a sop to Wells' readers? Or the indications of the writer's agnostic ambivalence? Or perhaps some of both? I know someone spoke with authority on some thread or other about Wells' religious beliefs, and how they appeared to change over time. If someone knows which thread that was, perhaps they could point us to it. Certainly a lot of Wells' descriptions in WotW are startlingly reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories, which are definitely set in a Godless universe, but-- unfortunately for mankind-- not a godless one! |
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Post by Charles on Mar 7, 2005 15:36:19 GMT
Wells’ personal atheism aside, the narrator’s relapse into Victorian piety underscores his faux sophistication and unreliability.
The novel’s ending is indeed the key to the Darwinian undercurrent of the novel - and at the same time illustrates Wells’ ambiguous view of technology. The older and wiser Martians and their advanced technology were still subject to natural law. Though evolved to a more efficient simplicity in their own environment, the moment they set tentacle on Earth they became subject to a new set of environmental conditions and processes to which their organism was unable to adapt.
Natural selection levels the playing field, and mankind’s ‘home field advantage’ temporarily saved the day. It was an ultimate fictional statement of “adapt or perish.”
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JonT
Full Member
Posts: 120
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Post by JonT on Apr 6, 2005 18:05:14 GMT
my interpretation was the martians fed from a syringe like apparatus, with maybe a drip, they drained the victims blood and it was slowly intergrated into their own blood. about those bipeds, have you seen the section of the martian opening sequence in the pc game? the part where they are testing all their weapons, they have a strange creature in a tank that they are testing the black smoke on, do you think that might be an interpretation of the bipeds?
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) needed for the blood extraction? In fact the writer does say that people mistook this 'hooting' for language. I always pictured the syringe method, and find it the most disturbing!! There is an interesting scene in 'starship troopers' that uses a natural method!! It's more to do with sucking out brains though!!
