News reports on the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who murdered 77 people on the island of Utøya, near Oslo, last year, are being filed from a different moral universe. In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells imagined that Martian “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” were scrutinising and studying earthlings “as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water”.
That could be a description of Breivik. His cool detachment in the court as he recalled how he stalked and shot his helpless victims was terrifying. It is a great mercy that he failed to kill more innocent people.
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