The War of the Worlds (Legend Classics)

By H.G. Wells

“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.”

The Legend Classics series:
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Importance of Being Earnest
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Metamorphosis
The Railway Children
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Frankenstein
Wuthering Heights
Three Men in a Boat
The Time Machine
Little Women
Anne of Green Gables
The Jungle Book
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
Dracula
A Study in Scarlet
Leaves of Grass
The Secret Garden
The War of the Worlds
A Christmas Carol
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Heart of Darkness
The Scarlet Letter
This Side of Paradise
Oliver Twist
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Treasure Island
The Turn of the Screw
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Emma
The Trial
A Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Grimm Fairy Tales
The Awakening
Mrs Dalloway
Gulliver’s Travels
The Castle of Otranto
Silas Marner
Hard Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789550641

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English novelist who helped to define modern science fiction. Wells came from humble beginnings with a working-class family. As a teen, he was a draper’s assistant before earning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science. It was there that he expanded his horizons learning different subjects like physics and biology. Wells spent his free time writing stories, which eventually led to his groundbreaking debut, The Time Machine. It was quickly followed by other successful works like The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds.

Book preview

H.G. WELLS

The War of the

Worlds

Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ

[e-mail] | www.legendpress.co.uk

Print ISBN 978-1-7895506-3-4

Ebook ISBN 978-1-7895506-4-1

Set in Times. Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd.

Cover design by Anna Morrison | www.annamorrison.com

All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent in 1866. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography, and autobiography. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the father of science fiction, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.

‘But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?

Are we or they Lords of the World?

And how are all things made for man?’

– KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE.— THE COMING OF THE

MARTIANS

I.

THE EVE OF THE WAR

II.

THE FALLING STAR

III.

ON HORSELL COMMON

IV.

THE CYLINDER OPENS

V.

THE HEAT-RAY

VI.

THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD

VII.

HOW I REACHED HOME

VIII.

FRIDAY NIGHT

IX.

THE FIGHTING BEGINS

X.

IN THE STORM

XI.

AT THE WINDOW

XII.

WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON

XIII.

HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE

XIV.

IN LONDON

XV.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY

XVI.

THE EXODUS FROM LONDON

XVII.

THE THUNDER CHILD

BOOK TWO.— THE EARTH UNDER

THE MARTIANS

I.

UNDER FOOT

II.

WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE

III.

THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT

VI.

THE DEATH OF THE CURATE

V.

THE STILLNESS

VI.

THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS

VII.

THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL

VIII.

DEAD LONDON

XI.

WRECKAGE

X.

THE EPILOGUE

BOOK ONE

THE COMING OF

THE MARTIANS

1.

THE EVE OF THE WAR.

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.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety — their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours — and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet — it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war — but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.

The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.

A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.

In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof — an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm — a pin’s head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.

As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us — more than forty millions of miles of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.

That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping in peace.

He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one, he said.

Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features.

Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical Punch, I remember, made a happy use of it in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did. I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.

II.

THE FALLING STAR.

Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about one hundred miles east of him.

I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of it. Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex must have seen the fall of it, and, at most, have thought that another meteorite had descended. No one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.

But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand-pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.

The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was,

Reviews for The War of the Worlds (Legend Classics)

[judygibson-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story!

[pdcread · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the first time that I have ever read the War of the Worlds. I have been meaning to for a while now, but just never quite got around to it.

It is written as a narrative, from the perspective of one gentleman who lives very close to the landing site of the first Martian invader. He goes to see the landing site at Horsell sandpits, and is there when the first Martian attacks. Following more aggressive attacks from the invaders, he sends his wife of to Leatherhead to be with family, and he heads into London. He meets with various individuals, some of which he gets on with, and has to hide with a curate who he doesn't like much, as the Martians rampage across the south east.

It is quite forward looking for a Victorian / Edwardian science fiction book. He is trying to describe lasers and other devices, but he does not have the technological vocabulary to describe them as we would now. The dialogue is quite stilted, but given the time this was written and set, I would not expect anything different. What Wells does manage to convey is the terror that the population, and himself and his companions experience, and the despair and helplessness that he feels.

[tess_w · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

1950's martians invade earth. I suppose for the 1950's this was a great sci-fi book. The writing is lovely and descriptive, even though the plot advances slowly. I feel that many of the sub-plots are never developed. I read the free Kindle-version from Amazon and at about the 70% mark pages were out of order, repeated, etc, for about 7-10 pages.

[jlsmither · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading this book gave me the same impression that watching Casablanca did for the first time. Everything felt clichéd, until I realized that this is the source of the clichés. Once I put this in the context it deserves, I realized what an impressive work it really is. At first, I thought it was an interesting choice to put the aliens in ground-based ships, like flying saucers with spidery tripod legs, and then having them actively work on the technology to make a flying machine. But then I realized that this was first published in 1897. That's six years before the Wright brothers' first flight. How’s that for context? This was before the horrors of the Blitz, before the use of chemical weapons, and before heat weapons. That's pretty amazing. However, there's not much outside the plot-driven action in this story. The only characters that even receive names are two women (and one's husband, who never appears) that the narrator's brother encounters. There's no background on the characters or much about them as people at all. Yet locations in and around London are all mentioned by name. My guess is that this allowed contemporary readers—likely predominately educated people in London who subscribed to the Pearson’s Magazine—to more easily slip into the world, making the story even more dramatic. For today’s readers, this isn't as effective because the language, manners, and style are already pretty foreign to us. The version of this I "read" was narrated on CD, and that made the language a lot easier to get through. I would also recommend reading the Wikipedia page on this, which provides a lot of good information, although it's a bit spoiler-y if you don’t know how the story ends.

[liivin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What an imaginaton! Love all his books.

[joe73-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you can forget about the films and take this in for what it is then it comes out pretty darn good. Wells was possessed of an incredible imagination. This is nothing short of brilliance.

[ikeman100 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well written but for more pessimistic then I expected. There is a general feeling of hopelessness and death in Wells' stories. Not the optimistic possibilities of Jules Verne stories. A sad Victorian fate seems to run through this entire tale. "Life sucks and then you die", seems to be a running theme in Wells' novels.

[theelliemo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

H G Wells' War of The World - the book that spawned a thousand alien invasion movies, frequently featuring Will Smith wise-cracking his way through a bit of world-saving. From Independence Day to Mars Attacks!, the influence of the novel on the science fiction genre can not be underestimated.

To call this a science fiction novel, though, is to miss a significant part of the subtext, the commentary on events in late 19th century Britain.

Narrated by an unnamed protagonist, we see through his eyes the unfolding of events when Martians land on Earth, in southern England, from the initial curiosity of the indigenous population, to the fear and panic when they realise these alien creatures are intent on destruction, to the beginning of rebuilding when nature defeats the Martians. So far, so science fiction.

But there are various themes that, for me, are far more important than the science fiction element. The book was written at a time when the British Empire was at its height; European countries had a habit of colonising overseas territories, imposing their laws and moral codes upon the indigenous populations. In War of the Worlds, an Imperial power itself becomes the victim of imperial aggression, allowing Wells, through the protagonist's thoughts, to dwell on this: 'I felt....a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among animals. With us it would be as with them, to lurk an watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed.'

Then there is much on Darwinism, survival of the fittest and the process of evolution; the Martians are described as having large brains, being of very high intelligence, but lacking the ability to move any great distance without the aid of machinery. Written at a time when new technology was making travel easier, this could be a warning; are the Martians what, ultimately, humans could become?

And there is some debate on Religion versus science. The protagonist is temporarily imprisoned with a curate, who's behaviour and views the protagonist has no time for. And yet, towards the end of the book, the protagonist thanks God for the turn of events: that the Martians were 'slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth'

War of the Worlds, read properly, is a thought-provoking novel, even now, more than 100 years after it was written - the themes it raises are still matters of much debate.

[akangas_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

War of the Worlds is a book that tells the story of a man, the narrator, and his plight through England in order to find his wife after an alien attack on the world. I enjoyed the book very much, especially the characters. They were very developed, considering that there were a few reoccurring ones. I also liked the author’s attention to detail. The settings were really well put together. I disliked the lack of action. One would think that a book about Martians attacking would be violent, but it wasn’t. The characters in the book were the most likable part. I thought that they were very well developed. The book was an average length, and there were only five or six important and reoccurring characters, so it is no wonder that they were very developed and understood characters. The main character, who also narrates the story, is a very detailed character, because it is easy to see his goal throughout the story, and figure out his personality. He is a caring person, but will only do what he needs to survive. Another thing that I liked was the very detailed descriptions. The author made the settings very clear and easy to picture. The settings didn’t change much, like the characters, so they were familiar, and easy to understand what was going on at the time. Everything that happened in the book was very precise with the amount of detail given by the author. There were very few issues with the details. I liked the amount of detail given by HG Wells a lot. The lack of action was a dislike of mine. The story of a Martian attack seems like there would be a lot of action, but there wasn’t. It did leave room for more detail, but that was somewhat less important with not as much happening in the well described locations. It made the book, which was relatively short seem very long and less engaging. There wasn’t even that much dialogue, so not much was happening. Where there was action, it was in very quick short bursts, and was hard to follow, making the pace very inconsistent, and not as enjoyable. War of the Worlds is an excellent book. Though it has a slow pace, with few fast parts, the characters and details make it an extraordinary book. It is a good book for a committed reader, because it is not an action-packed book as the title implies. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

[loucypher_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Pods hit Earth from Mars. Aliens begin there siege on mankind , using super advanced weaponry and battle techniques, it seems improbable humans will survive. Follow this first person narrative of a professor who witnesses the war of the worlds.Great classic story. H. G. Wells was a brilliant man and very creative writer. If you put this book into the context of the time it was written it's amazing how accurate he was with his predictions of future technologies. Written in 1897 he was allready imagining flame-throwers, space pods, bio-warfare and robots. Amazing!

[jackdteague · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a story, this book still holds up as a good read. I particularly liked the descriptions of the martian machines and thought how much more frightening these were then any of the movie versions that have followed. This is a classic in the best since of the word, the story is good and competently told with some very good writing, particularly some great descriptions of the aftermath of a devastating and utterly alien event.

[karlstar_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very early novel about aliens invading Earth. By now most people have seen one of the movie versions, but this is still worth reading. It still amazes me what Wells could imagine over 100 years ago. By today's standards this is very short, but still a great book.

[sprunger19 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. Besides being a fun in terms of the science fiction I was very impressed with the emotional description of what the characters were going through. The book was realistic in the sense that the characters were very real. There were no heros... just people trying to deal with something completely incomprehensible to them. When the Martians first landed the reaction of the humans seemed very real to me in that they acted in a group. The reaction of those who saw the Martians firsthand was much different than that of those who had just heard rumors. Also impressive was the fate of the Martians. Without giving it away, I though it was very ahead of its time (at least I thought so... I'm not from the late 1800's).

[ashishg_50 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A moderately interesting tale of marsian invasion of earth.

[theboylatham_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Eight out of ten.

From a series of seemingly mundane reports about odd atmospheric disturbances taking place on Mars to the arrival of Martians just outside of London. At first the Martians seem laughable, hardly able to move in Earth's comparatively heavy gravity even enough to raise themselves out of the pit created when their spaceship landed. But soon the Martians reveal their true nature as death machines 100-feet tall rise up from the pit and begin laying waste to the surrounding land.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There isn't much use for the Humilation game in my regard, there are always blind spots and blank areas. I read this one today over three hours, pausing to admire its technique. It is a prescient novel, much as critical opinion concurs, one I find so haunting in its reach.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

“the Martians are coming!”And they have Heat-Rays and Black Smoke to kick some English tushies! And they do!But as exciting as this all sounds, this book is rather boring. It's mostly about running and hiding and being frightened out of one's mind. No "war" to speak of. But lots of histrionics. Lots. I really wish I could have smacked the narrator's face. Lots. Also, the localities are very casually mentioned, and as I'm not familiar with those places, it made no impact on me whatsoever. In fact, the listing of places became a big part of my boredom. Where is he running? Then where? Ah, who gives a damn. In fact, I rooted for the Martians! Dang.

[mhanover10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this as an audiobook. I saw the Tom Cruise movie and so I was comparing this to the movie. I don't think I would have wanted aliens invading Earth back in the time when there was horse and buggy and no cell phones and the weaponry wasn't as sophisticated as it is now. very entertaining for a long car ride.

[kronos999_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While I have had many exposures to this sort of story, this is the first time I've gotten around to reading the original alien invasion novel. Greatly enjoyed it. The contrast over time between this Victorian novel and later stories in the details (rather than the overarching aspects) made it even more interesting. I preferred it to the 1930's broadcast. One flaw that did annoy me was the way the narrator's brother appeared and vanished with no explanation from the narrative.

[duck2ducks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Most interesting thing about this book is the style: It doesn't read very much as a normal novel would - the famous ending is not one of exciting climax, but just eventual resolution - yet this rather works in its favor, as one gets the sense of the reportage of an actual war. It does get a little dry at times, but in other cases - such as the main character being trapped in a ruined house for two weeks, starving, with the Martians stationed right outside - it effectively conveys a real sense of suspense and dread.

[csweder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about this book was the fact that Wells did not describe what an alien looked like until page 99.

I was attracted to this book because I knew what a stir Orson Well's adaptation made: this book is well known, but I'd never read it. I found myself almost all the way through and realizing I didn't know how it ended. Do the humans live, or do Martians win?

It took me longer than I would have liked to read it, but once I devoted myself to it, it didn't take long. This was much better than The Island of Dr. Moreau , and I am interested in reading more [author: H. G. Wells].

I'm ready to hear/read the Orson Wells version now...then maybe watch the movie.

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was sure I’d read The War of the Worlds, because it’s one of those really famous and perpetually-referenced works of fiction that eventually just seeps into your brain by osmosis. I’m pretty sure I did read an abridged version in primary school, and I’ve read the excellent 2006 graphic novel Dark Horse put out, and I’ve seen the (greatly underrated) 2005 Spielberg film, and I’ve read Christopher Priest’s bizarre mash-up of it in The Space Machine. I know the plot pretty much off by heart. So it was with surprise that I recently realised I’d never actually read the original, unabridged novel.The Martians invade England, lay waste to the land with their tripod battle machines and deadly heat-ray, scatter the British military before them, and eventually die because of Terran bacteria. That’s the synopsis that everybody knows. But even if you think you know this story, it’s well worth reading, because unlike most 19th century classics it’s an absolute cracker of a book.One of the things I was most impressed by was Wells’ ability to develop a dreadful suspense, even though I knew precisely what was coming – and, you know, I’m sure even the readers at the time figured it out from the title. The War of the Worlds begins on a beautiful midsummer night in the London commuter town of Woking, amidst the utterly ordinary environment of the Victorian suburbs. (Incidentally, I enjoyed how the summer itself seemed a visceral part of the events – what is it about apocalyptic stories and summer? The Stand and the TV series The Walking Dead come to mind.) Strange conflagrations are witnessed by astronomers on the surface of Mars, and shortly afterwards, a falling star lands on the common near Woking. This moment in time – the beautifully written warm twilight of a Friday evening – is merely the beginning of a terrible destruction that will be wrought upon southern England.Alien invasion stories are a dime a dozen these days, but when Wells first wrote The War of the Worlds it was something completely new: one of the first hard science fiction novels, challenging notions about British (and indeed human) supremacy over the planet, and depicting the reactions of the characters to terrible events above and beyond them with stunning clarity. One the one hand, it’s fascinating to see how differently a apocalyptic event would have been a century ago, chiefly in how slowly the news travels – even the narrator remarks on how strange it is, a few hours after the first Martians incinerate dozens of people at the first landing site, for him to stumble terrified back into Woking and find that only a few miles away people are still going about their business. Likewise, the true gravity of the situation is slow to descend upon the citizens of the capital, chiefly because “the majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers.”Yet on the other hand, when the reality of the danger does sink in, Wells’ description of the panicked evacuation of six million people from London – one of the finest scenes in the novel – is weirdly modern. One might have expected a Victorian writer to fill it with acts of bravery, chivalry and decorum, but instead we see an ugly mass of people trampling over each other in their haste to escape.Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly through the home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede–a stampede gigantic and terrible–without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.The various acts of panicked violence which follow are, to use the word again, modern – a realistic point of view I would have expected from a mid-century writer, not a Victorian. It’s enthralling stuff.It’s also an eerie book to read from a modern perspective, not least of all as we approach the centenary of World War I. That war was still sixteen years distant when The War of the Worlds was released, but it’s uncanny how many things Wells accurately predicted: the total warfare, the sacking of towns and cities, the armoured fighting machines, and – most disturbing of all – the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons. On the other hand, something a lot of people don’t know about The War of the Worlds is that in Wells’ fictional universe, there are actually humans living alongside the Martians on Mars, albeit as slaves and food sources. This is only mentioned once, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s poetic license on Wells’ part or whether he thought that might be a genuine scientific possibility. Either way, it seems odd compared to how prescient the rest of the book was.It’s hard to overstate just how much of an impact this novel had on the rest of the century’s science fiction. Even the final chapters, as the narrator walks across a deserted London – a scene that feels almost cinematic in its use of noise and silence – no doubt influenced the opening of John Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids, which in turn was the inspiration for the film 28 Days Later, and so on and so forth. And I can’t stress enough just how madly, horribly inventive and compelling every part of this book is: the crowd gathered around the first cylinder at sunset on a hot summer’s day, the image of a Martian tripod striding down the Thames past the Houses of Parliament, the panicked flight of millions of Londoners, the devastated countryside choked with alien red weed, the derelict tripod on Primrose Hill dripping with “lank shreds of brown.” The War of the Worlds is an absolute classic of literature, and if you think you know the story and don’t need to read the book, think again. And, of course, it’s in the public domain and you can read it for free, so there’s no excuse not to.

[jimmaclachlan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a classic that anyone even slightly interested in SF should read. Don't read it completely literally. Keep in mind the themes that it is espousing in its dated, stilted manner. It's short & has spawned so many spin-offs & hype that ignorance of what Wells actually wrote is a pity. There is a lot more to this novel than just first alien contact or apocalypse. The man(soldier)-in-the-street POV & our salvation inspire a lot of thought even today - make that especially today. Yes, parts are dated, but overall it's an amazingly enduring story that shows our racial egotism off for what it is.

[cynical_ames · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A tale of two halves. An excellent, attention-grabbing opening which gradually deteriorates into an uninteresting and contrived mess made for skimming.

What I loved:

tantalizing foreshadowing
And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance , drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth.

the arrogance of man believing he is alone in the universe
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level.

realistic emotional responses ranging from terror, panic and post-traumatic stress from witnessing the horrors of war to determined attempts to ignore and deny this frightening new reality
“It’s a movin’,” he said to me as he passed; “a-screwin’, and a-screwin’ out. I don’t like it . I’m a-goin’ ’ome, I am.”

Suddenly , like a thing falling upon me from without, came— fear. With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the heather. The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as a child might do.

At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.

intimate brushes with death

I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had my foot stumbled, it would have been the end.

graphic imagery
It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.

...enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.

They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran— a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper hanging to the wall. In a flash I was after him. I was fierce with fear. Before he was halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken him. With one last touch of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt. He went headlong forward and lay stretched on the ground. I stumbled over him and stood panting. He lay still.

men clutching at religion
“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then— fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians?”

...

“Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”

Hahaha!


cold hard comparisons between the relationship between Martians and man and man and the animals
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.


And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.

“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” said the artilleryman.

Did they grasp that we in our millions were organised, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might exterminate us?

“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.”

the artilleryman's postulating on the post-apocalyptic rebuilding of society
And we form a band— able-bodied, clean-minded men. We’re not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.”

...

Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want also— mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blasted rolling eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty , after all, to live and taint the race.

actual science in this science fiction
In particular I laid stress on the gravitational difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him.

Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths. Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms.

As you can probably tell, all of these things I highlighted with a fervor on my Kindle.

What I didn't appreciate was the contrived and rather dull nature of the latter half of the story, most of which I skimmed. Meeting the artilleryman again miles and days away from where and when they first met - the odds of that are infinitesimal, the aliens abruptly dying from Earth's alien bacteria, the narrator's wife not only surviving but is reunited with her husband. And why was the narrator's brother's point of view given? We never see the brothers together. He's just a stranger to us as the reader.

However, I did raise my eyebrows at these unintentional funnies:

'cockchafer' - apparently this is a beetle but that's not what came to mind when I saw it.

His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.

Er, what? That's a bit spicy.



I was initially impressed by this classic. Unfortunately the ending left me disappointed.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting, but I prefer character-driven pieces.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the earliest stories of conflict between man and extraterrestrial beings, written in 1898, this is a pretty extraordinary book. The narrator is unnamed, a writer of philosophy and in this story he expresses various points of philosophy. This book has never gone out of print and has remained popular. That is pretty extraordinary, too. This story is not big on characters and none of them have names. It is written as a factual telling of invasion and rule by Martians. This book presents science facts, technology and ecological points in its telling. Another theme is apocalypse. People feared the end of the age as 1899 drew closer. There is a mix of Christianity and such constructs as natural selection/Darwinism. At one point, it felt the narrator’s experience was like the experience of Noah disembarking the Ark to a world of destruction and carian with carian birds eating the dead. While there seems to be Christian themes in the book there is the characterization of the curate’s emotional weakness and self centeredness that resulted in the need to kill him (natural selection).

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Martians attack!If you somehow have remained ignorant of the details of this classic story, be aware that there are major spoilers in this review.I have only recently started reading the works of H. G. Wells, and I'm sorry I waited so long. We tend to assume that books written over 100 years ago will be difficult reads, filled with convoluted sentences, arcane words and obtuse themes. But Wells is actually a simple, straightforward and highly evocative writer. I thought The Time Machine was moody and poetic. Surprisingly, The War of the Worlds was scary, suspenseful and humbling.The basic story should be familiar to most from the famous radio and movie adaptations. Martians unexpectedly arrive on Earth in cylindrical spaceships and quickly construct huge, three-legged war machines that immediately lay waste to the country around them. Wells' descriptions of the tripods looming of the smoke, hunting the comparatively tiny humans with heat rays and poisonous gas, are chilling. Wells describes the panic that overtakes London so precisely that the reader feels like one of the fleeing mob. In one of the more horrifying scenes, the unnamed narrator -- hiding in the basement of a destroyed house -- watches the Martians just outside as they drain and ingest the blood of their captives. Modern horror has to work hard to be this scary.In the face of overwhelmingly superior technology, man is reduced to a helpless, panicked animal. People are compared to ants scurrying in the road or to rabbits run to ground. Just a few days after the Martians land, civilization is effectively over. This is no feel-good Independence Day-type story. People don't rise up to save the day. The most frightening aspect of this novel is that it lays bare how truly powerless we are.Of course, the Martians are defeated by an even tinier foe: bacteria against which they have developed no immunology. While this development is something of a deus ex machina, the ending is still perfectly plausible. But will humankind learn from this experience? That remains to be seen.Reading the science fiction classics (2011).

[bridgey_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells ***I left it a few weeks before I reviewed WOTW to see if I would change my mind about this book. I haven't.I think most people by now know the story of Martian's landing in London and creating havoc and death. The novel is written in the first person by an unnamed narrator (something I usually enjoy). We follow his journey from when the aliens first land all the way through to their eventual demise.The book is approaching 120 years old, so I anticipated that it may be more than a little dated, but this hasn't bothered me with other classics from the same era. For some reason, and I can't put my finger on it, War of the Worlds just really failed to engage with me. Very rare do I find reading a book a chore but this was one of those occasions. I fully understand the foresight shown by Wells and the way he used and described scientific information must have been really revolutionary for the time, and because of this I can see why it is still revered today. But for me it didn't work. I found the plot extremely monotonous and at times just wishing the narrator would get zapped by the heat ray. On more than one occasion I felt like I was reading an AA route planner as we constantly get told the place names he is travelling through (which would probably help if I knew my way around London, but I don't). The house scenario really detracted from the flow of the plot and just seemed a slog through, that twist for me was a little unbelievable (even more so than being invaded by Martians) and although it allowed Wells a chance to include a little segment of horror, the whole concept of the curate and narrator being imprisoned for 2 weeks was a step too far for me.I know many people are screaming at me right now, telling me to look deeper into the novel, examine how the appearance of the Martians has the potential to reflect humanities own future or how Britain at the time was an empire crushing many parts of the globe and War of the worlds could be seen as a vision or warning of our own fate. I have to agree that all these themes (and many more) are there for the reader, but I have to be fully absorbed in the plot to want to dig that little bit deeper. In reality my enjoyment would only warrant a one star rating, but that wouldn't be fair. The book did have it's moments of brilliance and I would be the first one to put my hand in the air and admit that it is more down to my personal taste rather than the novel, you only have to see the hundreds of 5 star reviews for this. I wish I had liked it, I really do, I tried my best, but 3 stars is the most I can offer.Has it put me off reading further H G Wells novel? Not really, possibly just lowered my expectations. Maybe the next one I choose will be one where I haven't heard the story before so hopefully the writing and events will be totally fresh.

[jlsimon7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love H.G. Wells. I read his works when I was young, but I was to young to appreciate it. It was hard for me to conceive then of the panic that would have occurred in 1938.

This is a brief little book that begins with a radio broadcast of Earth being invaded by Martians. The survivors are few and far between. It is an entertaining read that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys short stories and sci-fi suspension of reality for a short time.

[girlunderglass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of the books that set the foundation for later science-fiction novels, War of the Worlds is a tale of a Martian invasion of Earth. The book is split into two sections, the first titled The Coming of the Martians and the second The Earth Under the Martians. For a book that is only 200 pages long, it took me a long time to get into it. All throughout the first part of the novel I kept thinking "yes, okay, the Martians are frightening and literally bloodthirsty, the protagonist has been separated from his wife and home and the whole of England is being destroyed, but why don't I care?" It seemed to me that Wells never makes you feel anything for the protagonist, nor his brother, who features prominently in the story and whose "adventures" bored me to death. It is also perhaps a mark of of the age I grew up in that I didn't even wince while reading the same gory descriptions of disembodied human parts, burning buildings and cadavers that shocked Wells's readers in the 19th century. However, after reading half of the novel I finally stopped expecting character development and stopped hoping the protagonist's ordeal would move me. For I realized that the narrator is not, in fact, the real protagonist of this book. The real protagonist here is the whole of humanity and Wells is excellent at exposing and ridiculing the folly of the human race. For me, The War of the Worlds is best read as a satire on Victorian culture. First of all Wells critiques imperialism and colonialism in a very poignant way. Thus, the same British Empire that is constantly invading other countries is now being invaded by a more powerful race that merely wants to expand its territory and pays no regard to human lives. The invasion literature of the time that wants Britain attacked by a foreign force (typically Germany) is also ridiculed when Britain is in fact attacked by aliens. Furthermore, Wells mocks his contemporaries for still clinging obsessively to religion, after proofs to the contrary offered by Darwin's theories and by the (then) recent developments in geology, anthropology, astronomy and other sciences. In the book, a clergyman who considers the coming of the Martians to be the biblical Armageddon and prays for God to save humanity is presented as mentally disturbed and is, eventually, punished for his outdated views. Wells' message is more than obvious. The Martians are never presented as mysterious, supernatural beings that no one understands. In fact the detailed description of their anatomy and their possible evolution process was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of the novel. Never before have the words "science-fiction" been more aptly used to describe a book. The War of the Worlds is exactly that - a book in which all the ideas are based on actual scientific theories enriched by Wells's imagination.Conclusion? The second part is much better than the first one; once you accept that you're not gonna care whether the narrator reunites with his wife or not and instead try to observe how the entire human race reacts to the invasion, the book can only get better.