The war of the worlds
H. G. Wells
The war of the worlds
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A cylinder falls out of the sky onto Horsell Common and lies there, unscrewing. Within days the Martians have crossed the Thames valley in machines nothing in the British army can stop, and the narrator is one of thousands on the roads out of London. Written by a man watching an empire at the height of its confidence, it asks what invasion looks like from underneath.
About the book
Serialised in 1897 and published as a book in 1898, The War of the Worlds is the account of an unnamed writer living near Woking when a cylinder from Mars lands on the common. The thing inside is slow and helpless in Earth’s gravity for a day, which is the last advantage humanity gets: within a week the Martians are crossing the Thames valley in hundred-foot tripods armed with a heat-ray, the artillery cannot reach them, and the roads out of London hold six million people trying to leave at once. Wells wrote it at the height of British imperial confidence and said plainly what it was — an invasion of England conducted the way England had conducted its own, with the same disparity of weapons and the same indifference to whoever lived there. The ending, which turns on something no army did, has irritated readers for a century and is the most carefully argued part of the book.
Characters
The narrator — Protagonist
A writer on philosophical subjects who sees the first cylinder open and spends the invasion trying to get home.
The narrator’s brother — Second witness
A medical student in London whose chapters record the exodus of six million people from the city.
The curate — Companion
A clergyman trapped with the narrator in a ruined house, whose mind gives way in the confinement.
The artilleryman — Soldier
A survivor of the first battery destroyed, full of grand plans for a human resistance he will never begin.
Ogilvy — Astronomer
The astronomer who watches the launches from Mars and walks out to greet the first cylinder.
The Martians — Invaders
Vast, cool intellects who cross forty million miles of space and treat the planet’s occupants as livestock.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer who trained as a biology teacher under T. H. Huxley, and the scientific romances he wrote in the 1890s supplied science fiction with most of its furniture: the time machine, the alien invasion, the invisible man, the animal made human in a laboratory. He was also a prolific journalist, historian and socialist campaigner who wrote more than a hundred books and expected to be remembered for the arguments rather than the stories. His novels include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds.