vague???

[TOMAHAWK]

Do you think Well's meant to be vague in the descriptons of the martians, after all we have little to go on in the book as to the makeup of the tripods, we can get a better idea of the actual martians (i tend to think of them as octopus like (evil octopie ;D)

Was this his plan ...leaving it to the readers imagination .. or didn't he really have an idea what they looked like.

As we have said before the book is ambiguous in certain area's ....is that why it is a classic?

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]I think its surprising just how detailed a description of the Martians we get considering his vague descriptions of everything else. I think this was mostly down to the kind of points he was trying to make about evolution and biology. [/glow]

[EvilNerfherder]

Wells' Narrator is a fairly anonymous 'everyman' and so I think all of his descriptions are meant to reflect that. He's no scientist or military man so he can only state what he sees and what he hears from the papers after the event. In a way, he acts more as our eyes and ears than a full blown character.
Of course, it also helps us to fill in some of the gaps ourselves, Wells makes us use our imaginations to do this.
That's why it's always interesting to me to see new interpretations of the FMs or the Martians themselves.

[McTodd]

He's not a complete Everyman, though. He's a science writer, with pretensions to keeping up with the latest knowledge.

In a sense, he's 'WellsLite'.

But I'd certainly agree that Wells was far more interested in the Martians themselves, their machines were merely vehicles (in every sense).

The same is true in 'The First Men in the Moon' in which Wells is clearly fascinated with his Selenite society. Cavorite is just a way of getting to the moon so he can have fun with his alien biology.

Don't forget that at this time (the 1890s) Wells is utterly fascinated by evolution, physically and socially. He is an intensely Darwinian writer.