H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds(1898) begins with ‘man’ as a ‘transient creature’ observed under a microscope, ‘swarm[ing] and multiply[ing] in a drop of water’: a fantasy or Schwärmereiof total control that is wielded, from above, by the other. The ‘human’, by contrast, is like ‘infusoria’, a unicellular, sedentary organism seen only through a magnifi cation of lenses. The Martians are fungoid, glistening, tentacular: ‘thin black whips […] like the arms of an octopus’ rise up towards ‘a circular disc [spinning] with a wobbling motion’; their ‘strange [bodies]’ are at once metallic and abjectly organic (Wells 1993: 21, 44). What the invasion of Earth reveals, more than anything, is ‘our’ own abjection, the disgusting softness of ‘our’ being as a ‘disintegrating organism’ (Wells 1993: 84). The novel ends, like The Island of Dr. Moreau(1896), with a perspective that engulfs the narrator who, in London, notices the ‘busy multitudes’ that ‘are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that [he has] seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body’ (Wells 1993: 171, 172). The presiding image of ‘the human’, in The War of the Worlds, is that of an unassimilable, undifferentiated mass of (un)deadness.

The sovereign view from above that Wells's Martian perspective encourages, according to Christopher Hollingsworth in his discussion of the ‘poetics of the hive’, is ‘a particular sort of abstraction’ that opposes the individual to the collective understood as a mere mass (2001: ix, 3).