Anti-Idyll
Castle
Distortion
Encounter
Idyll
Metalepsis
Parlour
Public Square
Road
Threshold
Provincial Town
Wilderness
Direct
Indirect
Interrupt
Jump
Projection
Metatextual
Paratextual
IntratextualTopoi Map
The War of the Worlds is remarkable in terms of the sheer density of spatial reference. Wells was living in Woking whilst he wrote the novel, and his description of the south-western London suburbs is extraordinarily detailed. It is often possible to locate places described down to the level of individual street, house or pub. More conventional GIS mapping methods would work for this text therefore, but prioritising real-world geography disguises the spatial narrative structure which emerges so strongly here.
The narrative contains four distinct sections and accompanying spatial clusters. The first, set principally in Woking and its environs, describes the arrival of the first of the Martian cylinders (landing craft) and their attack on Surrey. The second tells of the Narrator’s brother’s escape from central London to the Essex coast and then on to Europe. The third relates the narrator’s entrapment in a ruined house in Sheen; and the fourth the narrator’s journey into a deserted London.
Each is clearly visible in this chronotopic diagram. The first section of the novel is displayed towards the bottom of the visualisation, and consists of a tightly-knotted series of spaces, the two most important of which being ‘Horsell Common: the pit’ (the Martian’s first landing site) and the Narrator’s house in Maybury. The knot-like structure accords with the movement of this section of the novel, in which either the Narrator himself moves between the various locations in Surrey, or relates what is happening to others in the same area. This section ends as the Narrator starts his journey towards London (‘Weybridge: Shepperton Lock’).
The novel then shifts focalisation to the Narrator’s Brother, whose journey begins in his apartment close to Regent’s Park, then travels northeastwards from Camden (‘Chalk Farm Road’), through Barnet, then jumping to Chelmsford, Tillingham, and then coming to a close on board a steam ship off the Essex Coast. This is represented in the visualisation by the loop in the lower left-hand corner.
The third section of the novel is a substantial portion of the book in which the narrator is rendered static (as he is trapped in a house half-under one of the cylinders). Because he is static though, this forms a minor portion of the visualisation – the sub-loop at the very top of the diagram, centred on the large topos ‘Sheen: The Ruined House’. The fourth section, and counterpart to the brother’s jouney, is the much larger loop which extends from the centre left of the diagram, arcs to the top right and then rejoins the central ‘London’ cluster.
The tools used to make these visualisations are available on Github at
https://github.com/chronotopic-cartographies/visualisation-generators.