A Century of Covers of The War of the Worlds

Toby Frost

Toby Frost

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Not because there's any particular anniversary. I just happened to find these and thought they were really interesting, especially since they show how cover art has changed.

http://drzeus.best.vwh.net/wotw/

This is a particular favourite of mine:

0097.jpg
 
I like the blurb on the first 1910 one: "This famous romance displays wonderful imagination..." Romance?! I know that word has changed in meaning over the years but...

Aside from that there's some great covers there. It's interesting that the first illustrated cover was a Dutch edition in 1899 and then none of them appear to be illustrated until 1906. It's also interesting how many of them have so little relation to the actual contents of the book especially those that included distressed (and sometimes scantily clad) women on the covers. :)
 
There's a lot of re-used images there, especially the war machine off Geoff Wayne's musical version (I never thought that was a very good Martian for what it's worth). And also, I suspect, a lot of generic space art. I get the impression that in the 1950s it was illegal to publish science fiction that didn't include a woman being carried by either the hero or a fiend from space on the cover. I blame McCarthy.

I like the picture above because the walkers look so clunky: you can almost imagine the noise they'd make as they moved. Incidentally, the piece of ground in the foreground is almost certainly copied straight from a famous photo of the Somme.
 
I really like some of the Soviet covers. But then I've always enjoyed that style of art for some reason. What do you think comrades? :)

Actually it's kind of interesting that the Soviets would have allowed this book to be published so often.
 
The painting for the Signet edition originally appeared in the August 1985 issue of Omni magazine, in a pictorial on The War of the Worlds.

omni1.jpg

RogerDean-Tripodsinthemist.jpg

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omni4.jpg
omni3.jpg


The tripod was designed by English album cover artist Roger Dean. Someone made a model of it:

2001nats481copy.jpg
 
Toby Frost said:
There's a lot of re-used images there, especially the war machine off Geoff Wayne's musical version (I never thought that was a very good Martian for what it's worth). And also, I suspect, a lot of generic space art. I get the impression that in the 1950s it was illegal to publish science fiction that didn't include a woman being carried by either the hero or a fiend from space on the cover. I blame McCarthy.

I like the picture above because the walkers look so clunky: you can almost imagine the noise they'd make as they moved. Incidentally, the piece of ground in the foreground is almost certainly copied straight from a famous photo of the Somme.
Click to expand...
Hehehe I think you're right there :D

Interesting stuff about that image and model of the Martians' tripods. Looking at them I'm not surprised they were designed by Roger Dean the 'head' in particular is very Roger Dean (revealing my age there - I actually have a book of his art on my shelves). Actually that particular design could easily have been the inspiration for many of Neal Asher's second generation Polity covers.
 
Looking through that gallery, I suspect either a lot of the artists have never read the book, or, perhaps more likely, the editors didn't care much for any kind of SF and just grabbed the first vaguely 'Alien' image they came across...
 
A couple from my boyhood. I still have the one with the George Pal machines.



 
Darren Wilkin said:
Looking through that gallery, I suspect either a lot of the artists have never read the book, or, perhaps more likely, the editors didn't care much for any kind of SF and just grabbed the first vaguely 'Alien' image they came across...
Click to expand...


Like this one, for instance? :D

0347.T.jpg
 
Actually - why do I remember this stuff? - there's a point near the end of WOTW where the narrator says that he saw a picture of the tripods drawn after the war and thought that it was unlike the real things. I read somewhere that this was actually Wells himself having a dig at what he thought of as stilted artwork that had illustrated the story when it first came out in serial form.
 
Now they're cool. Thanks for the link, Toby.

You know, I've never read it. I started it when I was 17 but never finished it, I was probably distracted by a Playstation and Lara Croft, or something. I still own it, though. This makes me want to dig it out and have a go again.

Tom Cruise and 'Merica still saves the world because: 'Merica in the original Wells version, yeah?
 
I read the novel some years ago; as I recall, the narrative noted the lack of bending joints on the walkers, rather, they were described as being like telescoping antennae. Something about the Martians never inventing the wheel. But the creepiest part was that
they had evolved to be essentially all intellectual, & their bodies lacked stomachs, etc., they lived via blood transfusions.
 
There's a lot of very sinister stuff in WOTW, not least that the narrator reckons that some humans would collaborate in rounding up people to be drained for blood. There's also the fact that the Martians have brought with them another captive species, whom they use for food on the journey. It's actually pretty unpleasant.
 
Jeffbert said:
... the narrative noted the lack of bending joints on the walkers, rather, they were described as being like telescoping antennae.
Click to expand...

I did a search for real-world walking robots. There are robots with telescoping legs, and there are robots with three legs, but no robots with three legs that telescope. It seems, then, that a system of three telescoping legs wouldn't work.

Here are Wells' descriptions of the Tripods walking:

"A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave." [This describes how a Tripod in motion would appear at night if lit by a strobe. "Heeling over" is a nautical term meaning lean over, list, incline, cant. So a tripod moving toward you would lean a little to the left, then to the right, and then to the left again - with one leg on the ground and two in the air with each swift, tilted advance.]

"... puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me." [Clearly, the legs are jointed.]

Wells was unhappy with the illustrations of the Tripod that accompanied the original magazine serialization. It seems he was especially unhappy with their jointless, stiff-legged appearance. So here's the text he added to the first book publication:

"I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting machines, and it was there that his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect."

Wells specifically criticizes the tilted look of the tripods in the illustrations. But he, himself, described them as "heeling over" when they walk. So he probably thought they tilted too much in the illustrations:

15523172975_6c64d52517_b.jpg
 
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