October 30, 2018 will mark the 80th anniversary of a momentous event. In the year 1938, terrifying creatures from the planet Mars fled their own dying world to invade earth. Their first cylinder crashed on a farm in Drover’s Mill, New Jersey. After shooting down military planes and disintegrating ground troops with a heat ray, their war machines moved into New York City where they released clouds of poisonous gas.
It wasn’t exactly a real invasion, but some people thought it was. That Sunday night was the night twenty-three-year-old radio actor Orson Welles stirred up panic in cities around around the nation with his live radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Though an announcement at the beginning of the program made it clear that listeners were hearing a fictitious presentation, some listeners either forgot about the announcement or tuned in mid-program. The first forty minutes or so of the broadcast were written to sound like live news coverage, and some people bought into it. People in various parts of the country called newspapers and police stations wanting details. Orson Welles received a bit of a panic himself when he heard rumors that people had died as a result of the hysteria caused by his program, but those rumors turned out to be false. It wasn’t until he saw a lighted billboard in Times Square that Welles realized how far his prank had gone. At one point, he thought his career was over, but the publicity generated by his invasion really did help to get his career off the ground. (If you want to hear Welles’ broadcast for yourself and decide how terrifying it really is, there are several versions available on YouTube. This is a link to one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q7tN7MhQ4I ) There are also some documentaries about that night.
For the past few weeks, I’ve based the themes of my blog posts on books I’ve written or, in the case of Mike Casey’s Chinchuba, books my company has published. This week my theme will be based on parallels and inspirations to the plot of my book Intrepid Force: Invasion. Invasion is the second book in the Intrepid Force series, and it’s about an invasion from outer space, but is it a real invasion or a futuristic version of what happened in 1938? This is the description from Amazon slightly modified:
The adventures of the Intrepid Force continue in this second volume of the series. The attack on Venus Base had been stopped. Corbalew’s plan had been defeated, but that was only beginning. With only a single ship outfitted with nightmarish technology unknown to late 21st century science, Corbalew had been able to destroy Venus’s defenses in a matter of minutes. Now an armada of these ships has surrounded the Earth and rendered planetary defenses useless. Still weary and healing from their last battle, the Intrepid Force struggles to understand the mystery of the phantom fleet and, if possible, to find a weakness. Who or what is Gogue, the mysterious warlord who leads the invasion? Is he an alien invader as some say, or is he the Antichrist, a figure from Christian prophecy, or is he something else entirely? Aided by Neema, a young woman who claims to have come from a dark and terrible future, the Intrepid Force works to unravel the mystery and free their world before Neema’s future becomes their own reality.
If you’d like to read it, here’s the link to its Amazon page. There are both print and Kindle versions. (https://www.amazon.com/Intrepid-Force-Invasion-Timothy-Wise/dp/097255498X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1509934829&sr=8-2&keywords=Intrepid+Force+Invasion+Wise)