The War of the Worlds

About this book

The War of the Worlds is H. G. Wells’s account of an invasion of England by Martians, written as the memoir of a man who lived through it. It was serialized in 1897 and published as a book in 1898. It was one of the first stories to imagine a conflict between humans and beings from another planet, and it established most of the conventions that later invasion stories have used: the landing, the disbelief, the failure of the army, the flight of refugees, the ruined city.

The book has stayed in print for more than a century because Wells treats an impossible event with documentary seriousness. The narrator names the villages and roads of Surrey, reports what he saw and what he was told, and admits what he does not know. That method has made the novel easy to adapt; the 1938 American radio dramatization by Orson Welles, which some listeners took for a real news broadcast, is the best-known example.

The story

Astronomers notice a series of flashes on the surface of Mars. Some weeks later a cylinder lands on Horsell Common near Woking, and a crowd gathers to watch it open. The creatures inside are slow and clumsy in Earth’s gravity, and the onlookers are more curious than afraid, until a heat-ray sweeps the common.

The narrator, an unnamed writer living nearby, gets his wife to safety and then finds himself cut off as more cylinders fall and the Martians assemble towering fighting machines. The army is brushed aside. The narrator’s account of his own wanderings through the countryside alternates with the experiences of his brother in London, who is caught up in the mass exodus when the city empties. The second half of the book follows the narrator through an occupied landscape, trying to stay alive and to understand what the invaders want.

Themes and historical context

Wells wrote the novel in the mid-1890s, at the height of the British Empire. He later said the idea came from a conversation about the fate of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people under British settlement, and the novel asks its English readers to imagine being on the receiving end of a technologically superior power that regards them as an inconvenience. The parallel is drawn explicitly in the first chapter.

The book also belongs to the “invasion literature” of the period, a popular genre of stories in which Britain is attacked by Germany or France. Wells replaced the foreign army with something that could not be negotiated with and that made the Royal Navy and the Army irrelevant. His scientific training (he had studied biology under T. H. Huxley) shows in the Martians’ anatomy, in the attention to evolution and adaptation, and in the way the invasion is finally resolved.

Other themes include the thinness of civilization, how quickly order breaks down, and the varied ways people respond to catastrophe. Two characters the narrator meets, a curate and an artilleryman, represent opposite failures: paralysis and grandiose talk.

Who should read it

At around 60,000 words, this is a short novel that can be read in two or three sittings. The prose is clear and the structure is simple: two books, each with short titled chapters. Some of the Victorian place names and military details will be unfamiliar, but they do not get in the way. It is a good first choice for anyone who wants to try early science fiction, and it pairs naturally with The Time Machine.