THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

H G WELLS MEMORIAL

    'Twas not always thus.  The subject of the first contact with alien species, and the linked theme of earth under threat from space, has been one of our century's favourite subjects for fiction.  When we look for a source for this much-loved modern fable, we have to go back just over 100 years to the most important book of the genre, H G Wells's The War of the Worlds.

    In that 1898 book, the Martians don't mess about.  They are here to destroy us with heat rays (weirdly like the yet-to-be- invented laser) and poison gas (weirdly like the yet-to-be- invented poison gas) and sinister flying machines (weirdly etc.).  They are "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic". They are here to exterminate us.  When they attack earth, they crash-land in Woking.

    Tee-hee.  Although Wells's book is in many ways grimly prophetic - genocide, poison gas, mass exodus from destroyed cities, hideous new technologies of war - the account of planet-sized struggles happening around Chobham, Leatherhead and Barnes is a bit gigglesome. One chapter is called "What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton". And there are plenty of sentences that say things like, "the martians retreated to their original positions on Horsell Common", with the newspaper headlines warning of "Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!"

    This shouldn't be funny any more than Dracula landing at Whitby is funny, but it is.  (When the Count leaps ashore in the form of an enormous Satanic hound, members of the Whitby SPCA write to the papers expressing concern for the dog's welfare.  Now that is funny.)

    Woking Borough Council have seized the day (and, clearly, seen the funny side) because last year, to mark our victory against the Martians, the Council unveiled a statue in Crown Passage, right in the centre of town.  Michael Condron's statue depicts a Martian, which, once you have read Wells, seems like no small feat:

    "Those who have never seen a living Martian can

scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance.  The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of its lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth - above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes - were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.  There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.  Even at this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread."

    Now that is one tough brief. (I have resisted the temptation to cap the description of the unspeakably hideous Martian with a cheap joke about Robin Cook.  If you want one you'll

ANDREW SHAW

Scary: Michael Condron's alien

THE Woking Martian is a gleamingly bright tripod, made out of "chrome electropolished stainless steel", a little over 20ft high.  Underneath it hangs a beetle-like creature with antennae, looking not at all well disposed to mankind: the martian itself.  This may not be the 100-foot-high vehicle of pure destructiveness imagined by Wells, but it can probably give stray children and drunks a nasty fright.

    Good on Woking.  The Martian is an imaginative and witty piece of municipal sculpture.  Taken with Taro Chiezo's Super Lamb Banana in Liverpool and Antony Gormley's Angel of the north, it made me wonder if humour and wit are becoming more important in this kind of public art.  Let's hope so.  In any case, this is an entertained and entertaining response to the theme of attack from outer space.  At a time when a distressing number of people believe, or claim they believe, in "alien abduction", that is no small thing.