Ogilvy Right or Wrong?

[Tripod]

In the book Ogilvy is RIGHT, he says: ''The chances of anything MANLIKE coming from Mars are a million to one.''
While in the Musical he's wrong, there he says: ''The chances of ANYTHING coming from Mars are a million to one.''

Another incarnation difference is in the '53 movie.
One of the scientists says that although the Martians are mental giants their bodies are very primitive.
H.G.Wells says in the book that the Martians are mentally far evolved and physically as well.

(Just needed it off my chest.)
Tripod

[Thunder Child]

I always thought with Manlike, Ogilvy meant a civilisation, something thinking like mankind itself...

Johan

[Topaz]

I suppose that's one way to interpret it, yes.

Personally, I always saw that line as referring to the form of the as-yet-hypothetical Martians as being 'man-like.' Another example of Man's arrogance - anything intelligent would naturally be man-like in that point of view. How could it be otherwise?

I imagine Ogilvy was rather shocked.

[quaderni]

Ah, but Ogilvy lost on that wager... and Wells suggests that the Martians were once humanoid, if not human-like - they have since evolved into something abhorrent. Like the Eloi and Morlocks, Wells want to show us one of humankind's possible evolutionary futures.

[Topaz]

True and true.

It bears on a question that I've long had:

Are we assuming that the Narrator is correct in his speculation that the Martians were originally man-like?

Don't get me wrong, I understand the point that Wells, the author, was trying to make with this speculation. But taking the story as a literal one - that is, from the point of view of the Narrator, rather than Wells - do you believe that's what 'actually' happened?

I've always seen the Narrator as happily viewing the appearance of the Martains (not their arrival) as 'confirmation' of his pet theory. "Look! They're exactly like I believe Man will appear one day!" Without extensive genetic manipulation, I find it difficult to believe that a sapient, industrialized organism (capable of changing its environment to suit itself) would be subject to much physical evolution at all, unless it be the result of cultural selection, as opposed to environmental selection. If you can control your environment and have enough technology to lower the infant mortality rate, whichever mutations attached by chance to those that breed the most due to cultural factors eventually take over the race. (How this would relate to an asexual being, I don't know, although perhaps some Martians breed more than others depending on their access to food and good living conditions.)

It seems to me that the Martians would 'actually' be unlikely to have ever been man-like, and that the Narrator would have been mistaken.

[quaderni]

Topaz said:

True and true.

Are we assuming that the Narrator is correct in his speculation that the Martians were originally man-like?

(...)

It seems to me that the Martians would 'actually' be unlikely to have ever been man-like, and that the Narrator would have been mistaken.

Well, there are moments where we're not supposed to trust the narrator - the text has internal inconsistencies (whether intended or not, probably the latter, but still intriguing); and in the end the Narrator, as George pointed out, chucks his evolutionary speculation and returns to crass Victorian homilies about man, god, and the universe.

There's been some fantastic scholarship done on Wells over the past two-three decades, scholarship that has helped place Wells in the canon of great Victorian writers. Many of these scholars argues that we're supposed to read the book as an evolutionary parable about our possible human future, just like the parable Wells offers us in _The Time Machine_ . I'm quite convinced of this fact.

[malfunkshun]

i think by 'man-like', ogilvy was using the only reference to intelligent beings that he had... us. so in essense, the martians ARE man-like. they are intelligent tool users who have built a civilization, a lot like humans. i don't necessarily think ogilvy meant literally man-like, as in physical appearance. otherwise he wouldn't have used the '-like' qualifier

[HTT]

"The chances of anything man-like on Mars..."
There WERE man-like things coming from Mars. These were the poor creatures that the martians muched upon until they got to Earth.

"The chances of anything coming from Mars..."
So where did that dirrty great big meteorite visibly hurtling towards us come from then? Surely he should have said: "The chances of anything, apart from a huge mass of luminous gas, coming from Mars, are a million to one"...

Bet the Narrator wished he'd had a wager now!

[McTodd]

Topaz, you’re spot on there about the chances of something Man-like evolving into something Martian-like. However, at the end of the day Wells’s story is his and it’s for him to make the rules – if he says that the Martians probably (and he does qualify the statement) evolved from something man-like, then we must accept that.

As Quaderni says, one aspect of WotW is that it is an evolutionary fable. Wells’s (or, rather, the Narrator’s) views in WotW are quite ambivalent throughout. Yes, the Martians are Darwinian imperialists who treat Man quite as badly as Man has treated ‘inferior races’ of his own kind, but it’s not obvious that he deplores that, such is his scientific detachment. They are simply obeying nature’s laws, just as we do.

Whilst most people generally see WotW as a critique of imperialism (nasty white men enslaving half the globe get their comeuppance from nasty brown Martians) you could just as easily learn the lesson that imperialism (if by that we mean ‘invading someone else’s patch and pinching all their stuff’) is part of the natural order, morally neutral. Evolution, and especially the concept of the survival of the fittest, is at the heart of WotW on many levels (it’s also a warning against complacency; a parody of the contemporary ‘invasion scare’ stories that were kicked off by Chesney’s ‘Battle of Dorking’ in 1871 and which reached a fever pitch during the 1890s; and a warning of what might happen if science – whether human or Martian – is put to work explicitly to produce the most appalling weapons).

In any case, to get back to what Topaz wrote, if they aren’t the product of natural evolution, maybe the Martians are the result of genetic tampering by Man-like creatures on themselves? That is what Christopher Priest proposes in ‘The Space Machine’, I think precisely because he realised that it was totally unfeasible for a humanoid species to evolve naturally into something like the Martians. In the story, the bipedal creatures the Martians bring with them to Earth are the enslaved descendants of the race that created them in the first place millennia before through genetic engineering (it was an attempt to create vast intellects that could solve the problem of the slow death of Mars).

[Topaz]

Quaderni, McTodd - excellent points, all of them. I absolutely agree with your views regarding what Wells was attempting to convey. As we discussed earlier, he seems to have been exploring evolutionary parables throughout his earlier 'SF' work.

I'm trying to think of a method that I can use to convey my thinking here. Perhaps I look upon the book in an unusual way. When I read TWOTW, I experience it as one 'slice' of narrative from an overall event. From that point of view, there's an overall 'meta-reality' beyond that described in the book, from which the Narrator takes his personal experience. There would be an almost infinite number of tales associated with the 'War,' as would be if it had been an actual event. The Narrator's is one. The Artilleryman would have another, equally valid, account, converging with that of the Narrator at two points in the space and time of the meta-reality.

Is that at all clear? As I said, I suspect I may be unusual in experiencing the book in this way. In a sense, I'm deliberately detaching the themes and 'meaning' from the 'events', and putting them into the mind of the Narrator, where to me they belong. The fact that Wells has the Narrator present his own account as such helps me maintain this point of view. It's all rather like what happens in a courtroom. All the witnesses have their own 'reality', colored by the meaning they assign to the events they witnessed. From these, the judge or jury attempt to determine the 'meta-reality' - what really happened.

Within that premise, I easily view the Narrator's account as one man's account of events, and therefore as fallible as any account. This viewpoint, plus my engineering bent, allows me to 'play' in the meta-reality world of the War, beyond the account of the Narrator. I do take the assumption that the Narrator describes what he sees essentially accurately, but Wells has put so much speculation into the Narrator's account that there's a lot left 'unlocked', as it were.

What's the most likely evolutionary/developmental path of the Martians? The Narrator speculates about his theory, but in my world, it's just speculation. For me, it's not necessary that the Martians actually had a human-like form in the past. Wells' theme is contained in the Narrator's speculation that they did. In that way, the latter becomes an example of the message, rather than simply delivering it, and in the process further demonstrates the hubris of mankind. It's a facinating psychological view of the Narrator himself, justifying his earlier writings with the physical appearance of the Martian invaders. "See! I was right!."

Detaching the authenticity of the Narrator's account from the 'meta-reality' allows what is, to me, more interesting speculation. The Martian anatomy is really nothing like Man's at all. No bones, for one. The only mention of a skeletal structure is the 'gnawed gristle' left by the dogs. If you were genetically engineering your hands, would you remove the bones and change them to tentacles? Seems doubtful, as you lose a lot of fine manipulative capability in that transformation. Tentacles are great for capturing and grasping relatively large objects, but a Martian would make a terrible watchmaker, for example.

>>>>>>>>>> WARNING - Radical Speculation - WARNING <<<<<<<<<<

For me, the Martians resemble nothing so much as a vastly advanced cephalopod - a squid. Okay, okay, don't laugh. Yes, it's radical, but hear me out. The cephalopods are amazingly intelligent creatures, and it's been demonstrated that some species have problem-solving abilities and memory almost on par to cats and dogs. In fact, the Martians appear to my mind as exactly what you would expect the evolution of a squid into a land-dwelling, intelligent being to produce. Rounded body, ambulatory tentacles, the tentacles themselves, large eyes, and the general layout of the body and organs. There's far less transformation required in that case than there is in producing the Martian form from a homonid. Mars had ancient oceans, so why not go with the simpler explanation?

This was the direction I was going with the sketch of a Martian I posted in the 'Fan Creations' section (linked again below). The ring of tentacles that surround the mouth in the Terran cephalopods has 'opened up' and moved rearward at the bottom. The tentacles there have enlarged to take on the fuction of walking, while the mouth has moved up and forward to get it up out of the dirt, merging with the siphon in the process. Brow ridges have developed to keep direct sunlight and falling objects out of the eyes, much as ours do. Most of the rounded posterior half of the body is occupied by lungs, derived from the gills and mantle in the ancient aquatic ancestor. This also keeps the center of gravity forward, amongst the walking tentacles.

Cephalopod Martians would negate the evolutionary parable in the book in the 'meta-reality', but not delete the message altogether. The Narrator reflects Wells' themes in his views of the Martians and becomes an example of those themes himself, while the Martians themselves simply are what they are. Thus the message remains intact, for me, and is properly placed entirely in the minds of the humans themselves, where it belongs.

Now I'm going to duck and cover, for my heresies are surely about to be flamed. ;D

(And have I won the award for 'longest post'? Sheesh!)

[quaderni]

McTodd said:

As Quaderni says, one aspect of WotW is that it is an evolutionary fable. Wells’s (or, rather, the Narrator’s) views in WotW are quite ambivalent throughout. Yes, the Martians are Darwinian imperialists who treat Man quite as badly as Man has treated ‘inferior races’ of his own kind, but it’s not obvious that he deplores that, such is his scientific detachment. They are simply obeying nature’s laws, just as we do.

Whilst most people generally see WotW as a critique of imperialism (nasty white men enslaving half the globe get their comeuppance from nasty brown Martians) you could just as easily learn the lesson that imperialism (if by that we mean ‘invading someone else’s patch and pinching all their stuff’) is part of the natural order, morally neutral. Evolution, and especially the concept of the survival of the fittest, is at the heart of WotW on many levels (it’s also a warning against complacency; a parody of the contemporary ‘invasion scare’ stories that were kicked off by Chesney’s ‘Battle of Dorking’ in 1871 and which reached a fever pitch during the 1890s; and a warning of what might happen if science – whether human or Martian – is put to work explicitly to produce the most appalling weapons).

Two comments on your very interesting post, McTodd.

First, I think you're right - _The War_ can be seen as a critique of imperialism, but then the Narrator ends up identifying, in some ways, with the Martians. To paraphrase, Wells says that each fought for their own race. Much like he ends up buying all the homilies of Victorian society in the end, the Narrator ends up identifying with Britain's colonising project itself. Perhaps. In any case, I'm intrigued by your comments. As for the imperialism issue, I often think that _The War_ and Chinua Achebe's _THings Fall Apart_ should be read side by side. The parallels are striking.

For the 'genetic engineering' scenario, though, I'm somewhat sceptical. Let me explain why. Darwinian evolution, then as now, terrifies people because it eliminates design, purpose, and progress from the grand narrative of life, the universe, and everything. Darwinian selection implies terrifying, impersonal, deterministic laws that work on living beings, laws that are beyond our agency and control. Indeed, as historians have convincingly shown, this aspect of evolution troubled Victorian people far more than the 'fundamentalist' religious issues. Wells tapped into this fear. The evolutionary parables in _The War_, _The Moon_, and the _Time Machine_ fascinate and haunt us because of their seeming inevitability. Genetic engineering implies agency and control that, I suspect, Wells avoided for philosophic, scientific, and even aesthetic reasons.

But maybe Charles can clarify this point further.

[McTodd]

Two extremely interesting posts there, Topaz and Quaderni. Apologies for what has become a gigantic post, but here goes...

First, Topaz, I see where you’re coming from about seeing WotW as just one of many accounts of the War (if we treat it as ‘real’, a ‘meta-reality’). Hence, we have an account of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures (Wellman); a look at events on Mars itself, another perspective of the War, and a different view of Wells himself (Priest); and many others in ‘Global Dispatches’. And, of course, the essential unreliability, or at least partiality, of Wells’ (or the Narrator’s) viewpoint lies behind our (as readers) acceptance of the twist at the end of ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (which I won’t reveal in case anyone who hasn’t yet read it, but wishes to, is reading this).

All of which only go to prove Topaz’s argument. My only worry was that in arguing that Wells’ Narrator might have been wrong about the Martians’ origins, you risk neutralising one of his messages (the terrifying consequences of evolution favouring brain over brawn). However, I think you neatly sidestep that possibility by arguing that the message remains intact because what actually counts is the very fact that the speculation has been made, not the ‘objective’ truth of it. And, to be fair to Wells’ Narrator, he does actually state that he is speculating on the Martians’ origins (though strongly implying that the speculation is truth).

Nevertheless, the idea that somehow the Martians are descended from humanoids not unlike ourselves is a powerful one, and taps nicely into the image (gives birth to it, really) of the super-intelligent alien with bulging cranium (a theme Wells quickly returned to in ‘First Men in the Moon’) which predominates even today (‘This Island Earth’s Metalunans; Dan Dare’s nemesis, the Mekon; E.T.; even the Greys). The message even now is that to be super-intelligent requires a super (for which read ‘big’) brain. And it’s a message that science seems to tell us applies to us; medium-brained hominids branch off from small-brained ape creatures; progressively more advanced, bigger-brained proto-humans branch off from them, finally resulting in us. But science tells us not to be so arrogant as to think that there is anything ‘final’ about us, so we had better recognise that we will continue to evolve. But will we, physically at least? And is that what science is telling us anyway?

I don’t think that humans will evolve into anything much different from what we are now, not while we stay on Earth anyway (and even if, in the far flung future, humankind colonises the planets, even the stars, those who stay behind will still remain pretty much the same). And I think that’s what most scientists would say (Niles Eldredge, he of punctuated equilibrium, certainly does – for example, he points out that the birth canal limits the size of the foetal head, which is obviously a limit on the ultimate size to which an adult head can grow, though the Martians have solved this by ridding themselves of birth, instead ‘budding’). All of our evolution takes place culturally and technologically. We don’t need giant brains for storing knowledge when we can look things up in books and online; we don’t need giant brains to calculate complex equations rapidly when a cheap computer does the job so much better. In any case, creatures don’t evolve into something else, so much as a new species branches off and the original line either carries on much as before (look at horseshoe crabs) or becomes extinct (look at, well, pretty much everything that’s ever lived so far).

The idea that our bodies will atrophy and our heads expand says vastly more about our perceptions of, and relationship with, our bodies than it says about realistic scientific speculation. The Martians are as close to a Cartesian dualism as anything we can imagine short of putting a brain in a box. They are the triumph of intellect over flesh, the triumph, in fact, of our disgust with our own bodies. This idea, that our bodies are merely mobile containers for our brains (our minds, which constitute us as personalities, as individuals) reaches its apotheosis with the Martians – and is found utterly wanting. Yes, they have done away with eating and digestion, which consumes so much of our time and energy, and which lies at the root of so many of our moods; yes, they have done away with sex by becoming asexual; but at a terrible cost (or so it seems to us). They have lost emotion. They are incapable of empathy (would a psychologist diagnose them as having psychopathic tendencies?). It is possible that they have even lost a real sense of themselves as individuals, though I may be going too far here. The Narrator marvels at these developments, but I feel sure that Wells himself, that hyperactive libidinous ego, would regard these at the very least with ambivalence.

Wells creates another science fiction trope here, that of the super-intelligent being as super-logical rationalist (one has only to look at Mr Spock to see a more recent incarnation), though I suspect that was already a cliché in 1897 (is Mr Gradgrind an ancestor? Or the boffin-heroes of juvenile scientific romancers, such as Jules Verne? Or even real-life mathematical geniuses, such as Charles Babbage?). However, I think that Wells’ spin on the idea was to show the dangers of intelligence without emotion. Interestingly, in later life Wells portrayed our future in the film ‘Things To Come’ as rather sterile, lacking in passion; to him that was the ideal, but to modern eyes, it is Cedric Hardwicke’s artist-rabble rouser, Theotocopoulos, who, despite being the object of Wells’ contempt, seems more human, more sympathetic, than Cabal, the slightly frightening rationalist.

As for your views on Martian evolution, Topaz, I’d say, ‘Why not?’ If we ignore the parable and look at the Martians for what they are, then yes, it does make far more sense for them to have evolved from something utterly non-human to begin with. And Earthly cephalopods are surprisingly intelligent creatures (as a child I was fascinated by them, and read quite a lot on the subject, most of which I’ve forgotten; I even wanted a pet octopus for a time). Wells seems to have had a thing about cephalopods – apart from the tentacled Martians there are the intelligent, and vicious, octopi of ‘The Sea Raiders’, a creepy little story.

Now, on the subject of other views of this meta-reality, I agree with Quaderni that Priest’s spin on the Martians does vitiate the essential cold horror that lies in Wells’ evolutionary parable. It is the seeming inevitability of the far future that makes the flesh creep, that cold immutable natural laws could transform us into those abominations. But Wells was making very serious points in his writing, whereas Priest is merely entertaining us, parodying other late nineteenth century writers’ styles (rather than Wells’) by making his protagonist a conventionally prim Victorian gentleman.

I confess to not knowing nearly enough about Wells’ views on race and imperialism – as you say, doubtless Charles can help here. Nevertheless, I maintain that WotW is not as straightforwardly anti-imperialist as many believe, it’s rather more complex (or, at least, ambiguous) than that. I’m intrigued by your reference to Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’, a book I have not read but which I will look out for.

[Charles]

McTodd said:

Nevertheless, I maintain that WotW is not as straightforwardly anti-imperialist as many believe, it’s rather more complex (or, at least, ambiguous) than that.

Exactly right. It really is interesting to look back at this (early) stage of Wells’ career and see how ambiguous (and surprisingly ambivalent) he could be about things we might have otherwise expected him to take a strong stand about.

It is true his personal views on race and imperialism were sometimes difficult to distill. As a Cosmopolitan, strongly influenced by Enlightenment thought, he theoretically rejected the notion of imperialism because of its history of violent exploitation and subjugation. However, his concern for the commonweal of mankind would see his views evolve to what we might be justified in calling a ‘moral imperialism.’ He believed there should be a minimum standard for human rights every country should be equal to.

He also recognized that force might be necessary to bring rogue nations up to this standard if its own people were unable or unwilling to do it themselves. He recognized that while science brought the world closer together through what he called the ‘abolition of distance,’ at the same time and for the same reason the world was becoming an increasingly dangerous place, since old world nationalisms and extremist religious fervor almost never go gently into ‘that good night.’

[quaderni]

McTodd said:

Two extremely interesting posts there, Topaz and Quaderni. Apologies for what has become a gigantic post, but here goes...

The Martians are as close to a Cartesian dualism as anything we can imagine short of putting a brain in a box. They are the triumph of intellect over flesh, the triumph, in fact, of our disgust with our own bodies. This idea, that our bodies are merely mobile containers for our brains (our minds, which constitute us as personalities, as individuals) reaches its apotheosis with the Martians – and is found utterly wanting. Yes, they have done away with eating and digestion, which consumes so much of our time and energy, and which lies at the root of so many of our moods; yes, they have done away with sex by becoming asexual; but at a terrible cost (or so it seems to us). They have lost emotion. They are incapable of empathy (would a psychologist diagnose them as having psychopathic tendencies?). It is possible that they have even lost a real sense of themselves as individuals, though I may be going too far here. The Narrator marvels at these developments, but I feel sure that Wells himself, that hyperactive libidinous ego, would regard these at the very least with ambivalence.

Very briefly, and poorly written:

McTodd, I like this point a lot - I've posted elsewhere on another thread quite a bit about the lurking Cartesian dualism, that total dinstinction between mind and body. In many senses, the Martians exemplify the entire Cartesian project of self-mastery, of mind over body. Along those lines, I also believe, quite seriously, that we should see the Martians as hybrids - indeed, perhaps even as cyborgs. In one fascinating passage, Wells says that the Martians have become powerful brains that have learned to change their bodies at will - they simply adaopt mechanical bodies. But, these bodies are also oddly organic - Martian technology takes the body itself as the starting point for their mechanics and engineering. Indeed, his Narrator seems compelled to make this point over and over again in his text: the fighting machines, the handling-machines were not living beings, but proper machines. It suggests that these things should be seen in an ambiguous light.

But I'm repeating myself again from earlier posts. And, sorry for the atrocious prose.

(Minor point: I'm very excited, in an intellectual-curiosity way, to see how Hines represents his tripods for this sheer fact, because the advancee images seem to suggest that he's playing around with this stuff.)

[Gerkinman]

try singing "the chances of anything anything manlike coming from mars is a million to one"

and then "the chances of anything coming from mars is a million to one"
and youll see only one is in time with the music and actually sounds good.

[Gerkinman]

oh, and science has also proved that the human brain has infinite learning capabilities, so the human brain doesnt need to grow in size to become more intilligent. If the world worked like that Whales would be the smartest of all life.

[Cylinder]

Gerkinman said:

try singing "the chances of anything anything manlike coming from mars is a million to one"

and then "the chances of anything coming from mars is a million to one"
and youll see only one is in time with the music and actually sounds good.

"It's raining MEN - Hallallujah!" ;D

[Topaz]

Gerkinman said:

oh, and science has also proved that the human brain has infinite learning capabilities, so the human brain doesnt need to grow in size to become more intilligent. If the world worked like that Whales would be the smartest of all life.

Science may have "proved" it, but that's garbage. Any storage device has a finite amount of capacity.

This doesn't invalidate your point about brain size, but rather I'm ranting against 'absolute' statements like that.

At one point, Lord Kelvin (of Kelvin temperature scale fame, amongst many more significant contributions) mathematically proved that heavier-than-air flight was impossible.

Pity nobody told the Wrights about that.

[McTodd]

Quaderni, interesting to see that we've been thinking along similar lines about Cartesianism...

I've been reading over the weekend Leon Stover's Annotated WotW, and fascinating it is too, though I don't agree with everything he writes. I've also dug out a couple more books about Wells' work (Bergonzi, and a collection of critical responses).

As it's late, and I haven't yet digested all they have to say, I will nevertheless make a couple of passing comments...

Stover is convinced that Wells intended for his Martians to be the product of artificial evolution, in other words the kind of biological tinkering Priest posits. He backs this up with an impressive array of Wells' other writings from the period, mainly in the form of scientific articles. Wells, for example, was particularly taken with the work of the immunologist Metchnikoff, who, apart from his immunological pioneering, also developed a theory that many of humankind's illnesses and debilitations stem from our inadequate and poorly designed alimentary canal. He prescribed the consumption of yoghurt (still a fad even today) and, more drastically, the surgical removal of part, or all, of the large intestine, arguing that this became clotted and blocked with putrefying matter as time went by! This procedure became known as 'Metchnikoffing', and Stover argues that the gutless Martians have been, in effect, totally Metchnikoffed.

Further, he posits that Wells in fact regarded the Martians as superior to humanity in every way, and they represent his ideal of the cool, rational being, active and dynamic members of (presumably) a Martian World State.

I don't actually agree with this - I still feel that they are a warning of what happens when the intellect is prized at the total expense of the emotions, but there is no doubting that Wells did fairly consistently advocate a World State that to our eyes looks at best harsh, at worst positively totalitarian, and so perhaps his feelings about the Martians are not as salutary as I feel they are.

There is much else Stover discusses, and I'm also going through the Bergonzi, so I will doubtless ramble on at some point later in the week.

Charles, I am sure, will have some comments to make on the subject (if he sees this thread).

[Charles]

Ha ha, are you kidding? This is about the only reasonable thread left!

Most Wellsians I know take Stover’s annotated texts with a grain of salt, so to speak. His analysis is always fascinating and insightful, but most of us agree he places too much emphasis on politics (even for Wells, believe it or not). In fact he seems like a broken record at times…

Actually, I don’t think you need to disagree with Stover about the Martians being members of a Martian World State in order to think they are a warning of what happens when “the intellect is prized at the total expense of the emotions.” I agree with Stover that they may be intended to represent just that, but I have always seen the Martians as a dystopian warning against prizing intellect over emotion in all cases, the same as you have. You are exactly right also to say his feelings about the Martians are not as ‘salutary’ as some may take them, just the same as his Selenites are not exactly sympathetic characters.