This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.
Nathaniel Otjen’s article, “Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds,” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Otjen discusses how attending to energy concerns in the novel yields new understandings of fin de siècle anxieties about the end of western modernity.
When I think about H.G. Wells’s classic science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, one particular scene stands out. More memorable than even the Martians torching the British countryside, the scene of the narrator looking out from his second-story window upon the fiery chaos of a wrecked train has, for me, come to represent the novel. The locomotive — a symbol of modernity — had previously given the narrator a sense of security and identity, assuring him of Britain’s prosperity. Its spectacular destruction, however, signals the rapid termination of modernity and leads the narrator to question his identity as the beneficiary of technological advancement. In this single moment, modernity and its attendant feelings and attitudes are plunged into doubt.
The image of a badly damaged train is, of course, one that late Victorians knew quite well. At the time when I was first contemplating this passage, the image of a wrecked train also seemed very familiar, especially in relation to contemporary environmental issues. The derailment of trains carrying crude oil from the Bakken fields has increased at an alarming rate, causing catastrophic spills in the U.S. and Canada, for example. Additionally, transportation, including the shipment of materials by train, is a significant contributor to climate change. As I write this, First Nations peoples across Canada are blockading freight and passenger rails in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation to protest the Coastal GasLink liquified natural gas pipeline. It seems fitting that a stopped train has become a potent metaphor to describe or challenge the current moment; many feel that the world is a train wreck, a speeding train that has gone off the rails.
As I considered the constellations of images and imaginaries associated with Victorian and contemporary North American train wrecks, I realized that they reveal societal anxieties about the end of western modernity. In The War of the Worlds the destruction of the train marks the end of British modernity and the beginning of Martian control; in contemporary disasters, the petroleum-leaking or activist-stalled train threatens what Stephanie LeMenager calls “petromodernity.” Making this comparison, I noticed that both versions of modernity rely upon forms of energy to bring themselves into existence, and that both become threatened when energy sources fail. Fossil fuel energies in particular have provided the conditions that make the feelings, attitudes, and experiences of various modernities possible. The disruption of these energies unsettles projects of modernity.
Guided by my interest in the relationship among energy, modernity, and modernist literature, I began to track fossil fuels and other forms of energy throughout Wells’s novel and his broader oeuvre. I learned that Wells was fascinated by sources of energy and assiduously studied how fossil fuels were interwoven with Victorian life. Wells became especially concerned that Britain’s voracious appetite for cheap combustible energy would exhaust all remaining coal deposits. As I argue in “Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds,” Wells’s novel imagines a scenario when Britain can no longer rely on fossil fuels, particularly coal, and uses the invading Martians to explore alternative energy sources. Read in this way, The War of the Worlds becomes a cautionary narrative that warns against the overconsumption of fossil energies and speaks directly to the current moment.
How might fears about overconsuming fossil fuels in the late nineteenth century help scholars understand energy anxieties of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as “peak” or “tough” oil discourse? As a critical practice, how can reading modernist literature through an energy lens redirect attention to the feelings, experiences, and subjectivities that arise through fossil fuel consumption? And how has science fiction imagined alternative forms of energy that make possible new futures, perhaps even new modernities? These are just a few questions about literature, material conditions, and cultural imaginations that open productive avenues of research.
Thinking about energy is a practice of seeing things differently. It asks us to attend to material and immaterial conditions that erasure and active forgetting have made largely unseen. For many of us in academia, myself included, the practice of seeing differently often begins in the college classroom. This essay emerged from Paul Peppis’s seminar on popular modernisms, and developed through multidisciplinary conversations across the environmental humanities at the University of Oregon. I believe that seeing differently — in the classroom and beyond — can promote ways of living differently. Through The War of the Worlds Wells envisions alternative energy futures and helps us imagine different lives.
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Nathaniel Otjen is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon where he studies and teaches the environmental humanities.
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More from the Journal of Modern Literature 43.2
Logics of the Living
“The Echo-Harbouring Shell”: Of Shells and Selves in Paul Valéry and W.B. Yeats
Rached Khalifa
Mollusk-Writers: Spacetime Revolutions in a Literary Shell
Paola Villa
Circe's Feral Beasts: Women and Other Animals in Joyce's Ulysses
Lauren Benjamin
Peter Balbert
Solid Objects/Ghosts of Chairs: Virginia Woolf and the Afterlife of Things
Graham Fraser
Ritual, Place, and Pilgrimage: A Topological Approach to David Jones's The Anathémata
Rachel Pomery
• READ FOR FREE •
Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds
Nathaniel Otjen
Necessary and Unnecessary Monsters: Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings
Melanie Nicholson
“Horrible Washing Sawing”: Ecology and Anthropocentric Sublimity in Jack Kerouac's Big Sur
Elin Käck
Magdalena Mączyńska
A Matter of Scale: Race and the Skyscraper
The Black Skyscraper—Architecture and the Perception of Race by Adrienne Brown
Miguel Caballero
Adding Mathematics to Modernist Studies
Modernism, Fiction, and Mathematics by Nina Engelhardt
Rebecah Pulsifer
Mathematical Transfinites and Modernism: Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction
Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction by Brits, Baylee
Henry N. Gifford
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