Old heads will remember when Bugs Bunny cartoons got funnier as you got older. There was an incredible amount of subtext and current events punnery going on in there..which, since they started life as adjuncts to adult movies, makes sense.

There's an article in the SF Chronicle discussing War of the Worlds in advance of the movie release. Here go the credits:

William S. Kowinski is a writer in Arcata. His sci-fi blog is soulofstartrek.blogspot.com.

I went to the blog and got treated to a longer version of the article.

William brings out a lot of context that I was simply unaware of as a child...context it never occurred to me to look for.

Wells recounted the genesis of his story several times: he was walking with his brother Frank in the peaceful Surrey countryside, when the conversation turned to the native inhabitants of Tasmania, an island south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island into a prison colony. What if some beings from another planet suddenly dropped out the sky, his brother wondered, and did the same to England?

Wells' chief narrator refers to the Tasmanians, who "in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

It is a passage heavily laden with Biblical imagery, hinting at the religious fervor that hypocritically accompanied such genocides. Wells extends the analogy to American Indians (even quoting Chief Joseph's famous "we will fight no more forever" as the Martian invaders lie dying from earth's bacteria, the opposite of the fate suffered by American Indians, nearly wiped out just by the diseases European invaders brought with them.)

In my callow youth I read a lot of space/horse operas, where you could switch spacemen for cowboys and aliens for Indians without touching the plot or dialog...and I read them on that level. Over time I started noticing things like how odd it was that a human in a ripped up shirt should always overcome whole worlds of physically and technologically superior aliens, a genre that reached its apotheosis with L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth (there was some noise about aliens ravaging women but I never saw none of that, except on the covers...even then the alien just sorta looms over everyone. It's probably something you had to just know, like in the old movies when lovers embraced, the camera would pan out over the ocean instead of zooming in like nowadays...but I didn't get that as a kid either). And I noticed Isaac Asimov never wrote any such stories...in his, humans found no peers in the galaxy at all...in some interview or oither he said he had noticed the absurdity of the ripped shirt warrior plot line and found it more sensible to assume humans just happened to be the first ones out there.

As my personal focus changed the type of science fiction I read changed as well. It's possible the change flowed in the other direction...I was a big Harlan Ellison fan. By the time I read Lucifer's Hammer, I was conscious enough to be disturbed by the composition of the horde threatening our noble survivors. Not enough to keep me from enjoying the story, but enough to take note...one of my favorite "golden age of s.f" writers turned out to be a big contributor to some pretty skanky organizations.

By now, I recognize science fiction as the fairy tales of our day. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Walter Mosley's Futureland are full of beasts, monsters and magics of a sort that are as familiar to us as craggy old witches were to Hans Christian Andersen's audience...and for the same reasons.

William's article makes me wonder what else I missed in the classics (defined as "books you must know about", not "books you have read").

Though in his novel Wells several times suggests that we consider the point of view of peoples that Europeans conquered, he never creates sympathy directly for the Martians. We see nothing from their point of view. They always remain utterly and inscrutably alien, with no trace of humanity. They are relentless, coldly efficient, highly coordinated, and utterly rapacious. They collect humans only for their food. Everything on earth is simply for their use.