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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

> rather than preaching the author's vision of morality/politics.

It's pretty much impossible to have that. You'll always have the author's worldview shaping the fictional world.

There's a very important difference between the author's worldview shaping the fictional world, and preaching. For example, nobody who reads Tolkien can doubt that his devout Catholic faith shaped his storytelling. It is everywhere you look. But not once does Tolkien have one of his characters give a speech about the necessity of Jesus for a happy life, or introduce a character who had a child out of wedlock just so Aragorn could chastise her about the immorality of extramarital sex, or anything like that. Modern writers, by contrast, do that kind of thing on a depressingly regular basis. I have read so many books, seen so many TV shows, where the author thought it was appropriate to use the work to lecture me about their political views, and it ruins the work every time.

I don't expect, and don't think most people expect, for authors to not have their storytelling shaped by their views. That would be impossible. But it's not impossible for them to refrain from derailing the story just to lecture the audience on morality.

I don't recall that in War of the Worlds!

HG Wells' politics are plain as day in his stories. He was a pacifist and social Darwinist. The defeat of the Martians by the common cold (after the failure of military action) is 100% on point for him.

His other stories, sure. But not in WotW. The common cold thing just struck me as a tidy way to end the story, and the irony of it.

The story is an allegory about the evils of colonialism, told from the perspective of the colonized (in progress). HG Wells is on the record about that.

The common cold thing is a direct reference to what happened to European explorers when they first encountered syphilis in North America.

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