Epilogue: Gothic Futures

Abstract

The War of the Worlds concludes with the defeat of the Martians by the forces of nature: ‘slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared’ (WW, 240). Unique in its time, The War of the Worlds extended the scope of the Gothic imagination beyond earthly bounds and opened up the possibilities of alien creatures and space travel that were to become the staple subject matter of science fiction. For Botting, Wells’s imaginative leap is a pivotal moment in the history of the Gothic mode: In the identification of terror and horror as forces encroaching on the present from the future rather than the past, Wells inaugurates an important departure that renders many of the uncanny devices of Gothic fiction obsolete: while the irruption of terror from the past served as a way to evoke emotions that reconstituted human values, the future only presents a dark, unknown space from which horrors are visited. (Botting, 163) KeywordsScience FictionComic BookSpace TravelPivotal MomentDisease BacteriumThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.