Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds

In recent years, critics have pointed out that fossil fuels enabled the development of modernist cultural productions and sensibilities, and yet those fuels remain largely invisible within the art and literature of the period. The energy humanities, a critical orientation that examines the infrastructures and subjectivities of modernity that arose through energy extraction and consumption, offers an entrepôt into thinking fossil fuels and other energy forms in modernist texts. The War of the Worlds presents several ways to begin thinking energy and the development of fossil fuel modernity in modernist literature. More specifically, reading energy in Wells's novel reveals the social anxieties of fossil fuel overconsumption during the late nineteenth century. Acknowledging the instability of contemporary energy systems, Wells's The War of the Worlds imagines the collapse of fossil fuel modernity and explores alternate forms of energy.