Watch this space

I read this nice well-intentioned book with devotion, despite its being thoroughly reader-resistant to anyone of a sceptical turn. For a start, these days, alien is corn. Everyone but a bonehead regards the universe as altogether a subtler mystery than is explicable either by science or via little men with misshapen heads descending on saucers to frighten nonentities on lonely American highways far beyond reliable witness. Happily earthbound, or sometimes miserably so, I have been less concerned with ufos than ufas: unidentified flying angst, as we call it in our family, and we all know how our waking days, for at least one hour in ten, are decimated by that phenomenon. It is why we look for gods.

But of course, as the clear-thinking Appleyard makes splendidly obvious, The War of the Worlds was more about Woking that it was about Mars; H. G. Wells’s key to writing good science fiction (and he more or less invented it) was to keep his feet planted in the local soil. The best of space-age cinema, such as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, has rubbed the imagination to conjure forth all sorts of ectoplasmic or ludicrous genies without losing those human elements that alone enable us to identify with the alien. In films, novels, television series, and wherever the improbable springs to the surface — even on Orson Welles’s unforgotten radio show about an invasion from Mars that panicked America in the Forties — Appleyard covers the ground with a reporter’s competence spiced by an oddly credulous or possibly disingenuous relish, as if he has been forced to write a thesis less at the thrust of a conviction than at the behest of a contract.

He has imposed on himself, it seems, a journalistic idea from which he never succeeds in running free.