The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds (La Guerra de los Mundos) es una novela de H.G. Wells, un escritor inglés que murió en 1.946 (hace 77 años). El nivel de inglés no es demasiado elevado y se puede usar perfectamente en la clase.

En los párrafos de abajo (en inglés) se cuenta sobre la necesidad de los marcianos de conquistar la tierra ya que su propio planeta está desapareciendo. Y sin darnos cuenta los terrícolas hemos sido observados desde lejos, antes del ataque e invasión.

También levantamos nuestra voz contra los racistas de porquería, que hablan de más, te consideran un mono, pero sí disfrutan de los recursos de la tierra ajena.

En vocabulario buscamos molten y shrunk y para ampliar nuestros conocimientos investigamos sobre los tasmanos.

 

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us…

 

Introducción

The War of the Worlds fue primero serializada en 1897, en Gran Bretaña, por Pearson´s Magazine y en los Estados Unidos por Cosmopolitan. Es una de las primeras historias que detallan un conflicto entre la humanidad y los extraterrestres. Es narrada en primera persona por un protagonista de Surrey y su hermano menor en Londres, mientras el sur de Inglaterra es invadido por los marcianos.

El argumento es similar a otros trabajos de literatura de invasión de la época y ha sido interpretado como un comentario en la teoría de la evolución, imperialismo y miedos de la era Victoriana, supersticiones y prejuicios. Algunos historiadores argumentaron que Wells escribió el libro para motivar al lector a cuestionar la moralidad del imperialismo.

Aborígenes Tasmanos en l.860.

Paragraphs

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones.

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. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting delicate clouds of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has created, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety… (Del original en un inglés más fácil, The War of the Worlds, de H.G. Wells)

Vocabulario

Molten: melted or made liquid by being heated to very high temperatures.

Shrink-shrank: to become smaller, or to make something smaller.

Para saber

The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination…

La oración anterior se traduce: Los Tasmanos, a pesar de su parecido humano, fueron completados borrados de la existencia en una guerra de exterminio…

H.G. Wells, no sé si a propósito, ofende a toda una población, los aborígenes de Tasmania, que no solo se parecían sino que eran seres humanos, hermano. Seres humanos que fueron reducidos a la nada, masacrados, por los colonos llegados de Gran Bretaña. No eran monos, no eran una especie inferior, solo carecían de las armas modernas y del poderoso ejército de la reina de Inglaterra para hacer valer sus derechos.

 

Tasmanians (o Palawa): antes de la colonización británica de Tasmania en 1.803 había un estimado de 15.000 Palawas. En tres décadas, para 1.835, solo quedaban 400 sobrevivientes aborígenes, la mayoría de ellos encerrados.

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