PRICKLY PEARS AND MARTIAN WEEDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 145

a fictional hybrid of the prickly pear and the waterweed, Wells created a plant that
could transcend existing taxonomic categories and breach habitat boundaries: a
simultaneously terrestrial and aquatic plant that could spread rapidly and tumul-
tuously through disparate environments and thus embody the threat of total
invasion.
The spread of the Martian red weed echoes the advance of humanity's primary
antagonist in the novel, the advanced Martian species, reinforcing the invasion
theme through repetition, but the plant invasion also has its own distinctive
significance. When, after days spent in hiding from the Martian invaders, Wells's
narrator emerges into the open, he finds himself confronted with an 'accursed
unearthly' landscape (Wells, [1898] 2009: 170). He states:
I had not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated
this startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see Sheen in ruins
- I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet.
(ibid.: 169)
The sight of a once-familiar landscape transformed by alien vegetation arouses in
Wells's narrator a sense of defeat. He states:
I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind,
that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that
I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian
heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide;
the fear and empire of man had passed away.
(ibid.: 169-170)
It is significant that it is not the sight of the advanced Martian species in their
mechanical tripods that first inspires in the narrator this sense of dethronement, but
rather the sight of a known landscape transformed almost overnight by the
incursion of alien vegetation. Although, on a rational level, it is the technologically
advanced Martian species that the narrator regards as having conquered humanity,
it is the sense of powerlessness against an organism understood as less than, not more
than, human, that acts as the trigger for this sense of dethronement.
It is the two-pronged nature of the Martian attack - an attack by both a species
regarded as superior and a species assumed to be inferior - that succeeds in so
wholly demoralising the narrator. The advance party of Martian invaders is in fact
quite limited in number, made up of only a few individuals, and cannot maintain
a continuous presence throughout the whole territory that it has seized; however,
the uninterrupted coverage of the red weed creates a sense of pervasive occupation.
The incursion of the red weed turns the landing of a handful of Martians into an
experience of total invasion.
History and fiction inform and amplify each other via Wells's novel. Accounts
of the spread of introduced species such as the prickly pear and the waterweed, the