The Tripods of Vulcan and Mars

Good title, eh?

I’m pleased to make this quick gasp out from the depths of mid-term grading to announce that my article “The Tripods of Vulcan and Mars: Homer, Darwin, and the Fighting Machines of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds” has been accepted for publication by The Wellsian, the annual journal of the Wells Society. It’s a brief piece, only around 3000 words, that I wrote quite quickly over a weekend last year, but it’s one I quite like given the wide range of materials it covers.

In short, I address the question of why Wells chose to give the invading aliens of The War of the Worlds tripods for killing machines. My argument bounces from Roger Ebert and Steven Spielberg to Homer’s Iliad, with a stop off at The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection on the way. It’s great fun. And now I’ll get to see it in print.

As an additional point of amusement, Wells’ War of the Worlds was published in 1898, which means I can check the nineteenth century off my to-do list* of having published something about every century of the Common Era.

Anyway, it looks like the article will come out in the next issue, which is grand. Here’s hoping I get such good news back from my other two articles in submission right now — one of which will check the seventeenth century off the list. Not that this will do me a lot of good as a medievalist, of course.

*No, I don’t really have such a list. That would be truly odd. Though now that I think about it….