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News reports on Halloween 1938, following the WOW broadcast the previous evening, were snippy with accusations and demands for explanations and apologies.
Author H.G. Wells, from whose work the Mercury Theatre on-air dramatization was "lifted," was in London at the time of the offending broadcast. But his New York City agent hinted at legal trouble if the program's sponsors did not cough up a "retraction" of his involvement.
 I believe that Wells regarded science as our greatest cumulative achievement, but he also realized that science has had little effect, so far, in making us less violent or more compassionate.
-- Scott Sanders
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But just who was H.G. Wells, whose original The War of the Worlds, first published in 1898, ushered in a delicious and fantastically real terror for Victorian readers on the cusp of a new century? Think of what the Fox Network dishes up each week to the millennially challenged through The X-Files.
Wells' images of pristine English landscapes, littered with metal transports and evidence of heat-ray destruction and death, were transported to the present by a time machine called radio and locales that were distinctly American. Was the broadcast science fiction or was it a glimpse of the future?
Today, another author with distinctly Hoosier sensibilities contemplates some of the same intertwining of technology and the future of humankind. Scott Sanders, who was born just before the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, writes about growing up near a military arsenal in The Paradise of Bombs. He is a Distinguished Professor of English and director of the Wells Scholar Program at IUB. His new work, Hunting for Hope, contains 15 interwoven essays that contemplate the possibilities for happiness and engagement in an uncertain world.
"While H. G. Wells was an enthusiastic supporter and a great popularizer of science, he also foresaw some of the dangers posed by technology," said Sanders. "In The Time Machine (1895), one of his most famous works of speculative fiction, he suggested that the comfort and convenience provided by advanced technology might lead to a decline of the species. According to his evolutionary faith, the struggle for existence is what preserves our powers intact; and, clearly, the purpose of technology is to eliminate the need for struggle -- in many cases, even the need for thought. In Things to Come, written well before the invention of nuclear weapons, he warned about the possibility of a war so devastating that civilization itself might be destroyed."
In The War of the Worlds, Wells "indulged in some vicarious destruction himself, of course, where his fictional Martians destroyed London and wreaked havoc throughout much of southern England before succumbing to one of Earth's lowly germs. It wasn't ingenuity that saved us from the technologically superior Martians, but disease," Sanders said.
"I think Wells would have been amused but not surprised by the panic inspired by Orson Welles's notorious radio drama. The panic was increased, no doubt, by the fearful atmosphere on the eve of World War II.
"But even in times of relative calm, large numbers of people seem eager to believe in UFOs, alien invasions, government conspiracies, astrology and other unsubstantiated phenomena. We're capable of reason, but we're also credulous animals, as Wells realized. I believe that Wells regarded science as our greatest cumulative achievement, but he also realized that science has had little effect, so far, in making us less violent or more compassionate."
Read Wells' 1898 work electronically at this Project Gutenberg, Illinois Benedictine College, site:
http://esn.softseek.com/Education_and_Science/Literature/Review_7012_index.html
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