An Empire of Red Weed: Environmental Infrastructure in H. G. Wells's <i>The War of the Worlds</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that natural environments should be seen as life-sustaining infrastructures. Countering a tendency to see infrastructures as human-engineered, I show how environmental infrastructures are shaped by humans and nonhumans alike, with their life-sustaining roles often only revealed by their disruption. I demonstrate how infrastructures might be shaped by nonhumans by highlighting the career of Elodea canadensis , or Canadian waterweed, an introduced plant that wrought havoc on Britain's watery environments in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Red weed, the plant introduced by the Martians in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds , echoes Elodea in its course through the British environment. But while Elodea and similar introduced species prompted nascent critiques of imperial plant movement, I show how Wells avoids such critiques by deleting red weed, and any further environmental consequences following from its introduction, from his novel's end. Instead, Wells endorses a natural-selection-driven explanation for the British environment's superior fitness—an explanation that affirms rather than critiques ecological imperialism and mitigates the role of nonhumans in reshaping environmental infrastructures.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it