Embankment machine (The War of the Worlds) Embankment machine (The War of the Worlds) The Embankment machine (also known as the Digging machine) is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in the H. G. Wells' classic science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds". It is an excavator, and is one of the four types of machine the Martians bring with them when they invade Earth, the three others being the fighting machine, the flying machine, and the handling machine. The embankment machine is featured only once in the novel in very little detail. Rather than describe its appearance, Well's mentions it in passing
The War of the Worlds a draper. Trained as a scientist, he was able to relate his experiences of struggle to Darwin's idea of a world of struggle; but perceived science as a rational system, which extended beyond traditional ideas of race, class and religious notions, and in fiction challenged the use of science to explain political and social norms of the day. Good and evil appear relative in "The War of the Worlds", and the defeat of the Martians has an entirely material cause: the action of microscopic bacteria. An insane clergyman is important in the novel, but his attempts to relate the invasion