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conflict, the sharper and the more irresolvable the better, and then to find ways of overcoming the opposition without denying the validity of either side. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the process involves finding areas of identity that transcend the antithesis. In this sense, Wells' works develop, not answers, but intricately balanced patterns which force us to ponder central moral issues of our world.

A recurrent opposition is that between the human and the alien. This opposition generates a process of constant reinterpretation and re-examination of the bases of similarity and of difference. The War of the Worlds is a clear case of such restructuring of the initial opposition. While the cruelty and the repulsive appearance of the Martians are sources of antipathy and terror early in the novel, their very amorality becomes a source of identity with humanity when it is pointed out by the narrator that the Martians are merely doing to humans what humans have done to other species and races. Perhaps the Martians are not aliens at all but simply super-humans.

Wells' consummate stroke in the novel is not simply to have truly evolutionary forces defeat the Martians, but to transpose the tragedy of the human race that the whole novel has been working towards to a tragedy of the Martians. Such a transformation is possible only if we acknowledge, as the narrator does, the bond of intelligence in the midst of evolutionary chaos. The enemy at the end of the novel is not the Martians, but the wild dogs and the black birds, symbols of nature's vast machinery of death against which all intelligent life, human and Martian, organises itself.

Wells' SF works are clearly ideological fables', yet he likes to have it ideologically both ways. His satisfaction at the destruction of the bourgeois idyll is matched by his horror at the alien forces destroying it. In his works, he embraces a whole dimension of radical doubt and questioning that cannot be found in Verne. In this sense, Wells can be seen as a turning point in the SF tradition.

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