How Wells presents The Martians, and how the character develops across the text: the cold, superior intelligences of a dying planet, who arrive as sluggish creatures, conquer with machines, the Heat-Ray and the Black Smoke, feed on human blood, and are killed by Earth's bacteria.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish', 'That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars', 'The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts', 'Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance', 'There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin', 'it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way', 'an exultant deafening howl that drowned the thunder', 'two were stooping over the frothing, tumultuous ruins of their comrade', 'how much they understood of us', 'They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none.', 'Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence', 'They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs', 'They do not seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation', 'Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla'.
How the narrator describes them: 'Gorgon groups of tentacles', disgust and fascination, and his effort to study them as a scientist would.
Context: Lowell's Mars as an ageing world running short of water, and Wells's picture of a creature evolved into a brain with hands.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
