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The War of the Worlds

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A cylinder falls on Horsell Common outside London. Out of it come Martians with heat-rays and great tripod machines, and nothing on Earth seems able to stop them. By H. G. Wells (1898). A public-domain classic.

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How it begins No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence. Keep reading →

About this story

A strange object falls on Horsell Common, near London, and a crowd gathers to look. What comes out of it is the start of an invasion, told by an ordinary man who only wants to find his wife and stay alive. We see the war from the ground, not from the generals’ side.

H. G. Wells wrote it in the late 1890s, and it was published as a book in 1898. It is one of the first stories about an alien invasion and still the pattern for many later ones. In 1938, Orson Welles’s radio version moved the story to New Jersey, and some listeners took it for real news.

Themes: Invasion, survival, empire, how fragile order is
Good for: Readers who like science fiction at its source, or a story that moves fast and keeps its nerve
Worth noticing: That the narrator never gets a name, and that most of what he does is run, hide and watch.

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