Reflection: War of the Worlds class

It's a little odd, and perhaps slightly funny, that my thoughts on Anglocentric science fiction inevitably fall back to Doctor Who. But I thought a great deal about it during our discussion of War of the Worlds, particularly regarding the question of which race, the humans or the Martians, were more monstrous, analytical, etc. There is an episode of the Doctor Who revival entitled "The Christmas Invasion," during which an alien race named the Sycorax appears in an organic-looking ship above the surface of the planet Earth on Christmas Eve. Of course, as it is Doctor Who, the British are the very first to come into contact with this alien race, who holds one third of the world hostage, poised on the roofs by virtue of something called "blood control."

What is really, genuinely interesting, however, is that, at the culmination of this episode is xenocide. The Doctor, the Time Lord defender of Earth (and more particularly, Great Britain), has defeated the Sycorax in honorable combat, and they have agreed to leave. The Prime Minister has other plans, and gives the orders for their wholesale destruction, blasting the alien ship out of the sky under the excuse of planetary defense. The first, definitive alien contact, broadcast across the entire world, ends with that race's elimination. Mind you, in much the same way that, in War of the Worlds, the Martians start by killing off people, so do the Sycorax. They have, however, by the end of the episode reached enough of an impasse to agree to leave, and never return. It is the Doctor himself who pinpoints the terrifying problem of humanity's obsession with its own survival: "I gave them the wrong warning. I should have told them to run, as fast as they can. Run and hide, because the monsters are coming - the human race."

The Martians in War of the Worlds are defeated in much the same way as the Native Americans of Latin America were in the 1500s, through diseases to which they have no immunity. And yet the humans take this victory into themselves, the very fact of their survival seen as triumph. Throughout the book there is this sense of the Martians versus humanity, and when the Martians are dead humanity seems to glory in its own survival. "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth," the narrator says, "and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain." This passage shows, in my mind, the same dangerous ethnocentric tendency that forces Doctor Who's Prime Minister to destroy the Sycorax: humanity above all else, and the destruction of a species reckoned less than the survival of our own.