Author's note: This entire fanfic has been reworked from SCRATCH as of the start of 2015.
In order to properly understand the conflict it is best to have a knowledge of the belligerents. While the Martians are alien to you as they are to us, the twentieth century reader must also bear in mind that we are as alien to you as we are to them. Between the three there is so much difference that cannot be crossed or comprehended, much as a plant cannot comprehend its differences to mollusks. At the same time, we all share the basic similarities in our needs to sustain our material bodies, and that our consciousness is driven by such needs.
Though at first it had seemed that Mars had become devoid of life it soon turned out, after Terrestrial Man's accidents had revived their planet, that Martian life had merely gone into a sort of centuries long hibernation. As soon as their planet started to warm the red plant life began to once again grow, and its inhabitants began to resurface and once again operate as they had, as though no planetary cooling had happened.
Yet, upon closer observation to the Martians, one realises that they had been truly affected by the temporary death of their planet: The once large and bulky adult Martian, what was once a massive brain several times larger than terrestrial men supported by tentacle appendage had rapidly shrunk in the intervening times. A mixture of factors played into this; first was the reduction of sunlight, making it impossible for the Martians to receive enough vitamins from the sun to grow, as well as the coldness of their planet making it difficult for Martians to feed their cattle enough to provide themselves proper nourishment. This was combined with the fact that, with the collapse of their original civilisation, Martian life spans quickly reduced to a point where they died of hunger or exhaustion long before they could reach their true physical maturity.
The physical changes to the planet Mars and the Martians that inhabit them seemed to take their toll on the Martian mentality, too. Where they had been, twenty centuries before, able to cross the gulf of space to our planet they were suddenly so ignorant of our existence. Terrestrial probes were capable of going so far as penetrating the Martian atmosphere un-stealthed without causing stir. Through this we were able to do much research on the Martians without hinderance.
Martian technology had failed to advance at all since the last time it came in contact with Terrestrial man. In many ways one could say it had become more primitive. The once mighty and elegant Martian machines that supported them had become things clumsy and unreliable, made of poorer alloys and ineffective engineering. The buildings they constructed for themselves and the methods of agriculture they used were outclassed by those of early Mesopotamian cities of Earth. There was little that separated them from the bipedal brutes they domesticate for food, save for the fact that Martians had primitive hold on mathematics and industry. These were the beings that had frightened Terrestrial intelligence so long ago! Such lowly beasts!
It was concluded that Mars had fallen into a sort of a Dark Age. Indeed, the Martians were far more interested in feuding over one another than they were of defending themselves from us. Killing their own the way Terrestrial Man had done before it united. In all this and more, the Martians are more comprehensible and perhaps even more easily empathised with to the twentieth century reader than his descendants.
Terrestrial Man, if it can still be considered 'Man', had too evolved and adapted, but as a result of his own intention. Throughout the twentieth and fortieth centuries Terrestrial humans growth in technology reduced the need for human labourers and allowed humans to completely focus on shallow desires to maintain appearances. Bones were cut, cracked and altered, meat was removed, eyes were widened, lips thinned, and the digestive system was increasingly simplified to make for a leaner frame, supported by a fully artificial diet. At its peak, any member of Terrestrial humanity could be taken at random and should they have met a fellow human from any time prior to their own and the latter would be immediately entranced by the sheer beauty of the former.
All this would prove disastrous for the future, however, when resources became scarce. Through all the physical changes that had occurred to the race, humans had become things excruciatingly frail. The fortieth century Terrestrials had become so accustomed to having their every movement assisted that they were incapable of standing, eating, or even breathing unassisted.
But the effects of the artificial alterations could not be so easily reversed. Instead, we of the thirty-ninth century find ourselves with wires pierced into our skulls and arms, our spines reinforced with metals, and our mouths forever covered with a tube that fed us food, water, and oxygen while filtering out whatever poison there was from the atmosphere. Our physical bodies had become nearly immobile dolls, and the millions of machines that surround us became the true agents of the mind. These machines we could control by radio signals transmitted through the wires covering us, which then move at our command.
This too was the method by which we communicate with one another. Signals transmit from one mind to another in a sort of indirect telepathy. Vocal communication has ceased due to the inability to easily control the air in our lungs, but it remains the basis of the telepathic radio messages we send to one another.
By contrast, the Martians, whom seemingly never possessed a sophisticated spoken language, communicate by way of physical visual signaling to one another; in this way they were indeed surprisingly advanced; the exact positioning of tentacles could alter the meaning of the received message at any time.
In terms of social structure and values, the twentieth century reader would find them to be two opposing worlds, with their own world likely in the middle.
Martian methods of organisation were scarcely anything impressive: Their population had reduced such that they could only form small village areas, but all of these were heavily centralised into what were similar to Terrestrial nation-states, which were led by a small elite counsel that was made up of aged members. Such outdated dictatorship of an oligarchy; something already outdated by the time of the late Romans. These nation-states would fight one another often for seemingly no reason to speak of. We're uncertain as to whether Martian organisation was always this way, but regardless... this was how far the Martians had fallen; to have the hierarchical structure of un-evolved monkeys.
Terrestrial organisation was evidently far superior. Ours had reached a fully incorporated democratic society that was ruled by none other than the people themselves; this has become especially true after ridding ourselves of the world organisation of national governments that had created the crisis we lived in. Through shattering national borders and eradicating arbitrary government we live in a utopian social order, save for the hostile environment. We offer liberties and equalities and freedoms far beyond that which prior Man could conceive, and looked towards the new age with great hope, for it is the future that will come to us and not the past. A perfect, indiscriminate, all-loving international community.
It is this sense of arrogance in our liberty that ends up creating an even stronger will for us to invade the red planet. After all, we weren't there to exterminate them or use them for food like they had done to us so long ago; we are much more pacifistic than they.
'We merely need to move to their planet, and they are an obstruction in the way. Perhaps in future,' Man thought, 'we could even uplift them to be as we are! No longer the primitive beasts of a dictatorship! After all, life is equal. We shall give them the grace of learning to become like us!'
With these thoughts in our minds we were suddenly ignorant of the hypocritical imperialism we were about to embark on.
A/N: There are other differences between the storyverse and our own universe that I could not fit into the story without making it out of character; the idea is that the narrator is writing back in time to communicate to the year 1900 (immediately after the initial Martian invasion) of his timeline, so he would have no idea what our timeline is like, so evidently the narrator can't tell the differences.
The differences are, basically: The devastation of the Martian invasion and the ensuing chaotic wars end up rendering humanity missing the chance to invent many spectacular things we did in our own world that create the 'digital age' in which things advance so exponentially, like personal computers, silicon chips, the internet because they're too busy trying to constantly make bigger and more impractical weapons (and factories to make the weapons) so they can kill each other (and maybe the Martians if they invade again). Instead the world continues with technology that runs on burning coal or oil, or at best nuclear power. Technological advancement is more linear, so instead of building 'better' humans kept building 'bigger' and 'more', and there is no digital revolution; the last major human revolution is the industrial revolution, and you'll notice that between the agricultural and industrial revolutions things tended to change a lot slower than they do today in our own world.
Of course, the downside to using fossil fuels to power everything that everyone does is pollution, which we know is a terribly bad thing, but during the world wars (which, in this world, lasted several hundred years) people didn't quite realise it, and even into the early/mid cold war people were still seeing factories and smoke as a sign of strength and development.
The reason I'm keeping humanity's development limited is because (a) It's easier to imagine a future with slightly superior engineering and inferior technology than it is to imagine a future with ultra-futuristic super-lasers as a writer, (b) Because if humanity kept at it's modern rate we'd probably be able to move to other star systems by the time global warming is toxic, so we wouldn't invade Mars, and (c) Because during the filming of the 1953 film version of War of the Worlds the US army had experts that told the film makers that any modern army at the time could easily wipe the floor with the Martians of the original novel, and I didn't just want to do the 'force field' thing that the films do, so instead I keep both the Martians and Terrestrials limited to technologies imaginable by humans in the early 1900s.
Oh, and also Mars is inhabitable in this story. Which it's not in reality. I'm sure you knew that already.