1.3 | Failing Score on a Disclosure Test Run

Yearbook 2023 chapter

Douthat’s tweeted reference to The War of the Worlds was misleading in that the shootdowns did not presage an alien invasion, but it was apt in other ways. In its first few chapters, H.G. Wells’s novel depicts how a society would wake up to a disclosure-level event slowly and incrementally. It takes several days, even with constant news coverage, for the fictionalized citizens of southern England to realize what is going on. At every stage of the Martians’ arrival--the flashes observed on Mars, the shooting stars, the cylinder crashing in the pit, and the emergence of the cylinder’s occupants--people are either unaware or have differing interpretations of these events. “Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon Mars,” the novel’s narrator explains. “The seriocomic periodical Punch, I remember, made a happy use of it in the political cartoon. …It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did…. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle…”