The War of the Worlds

• 1. Introduction

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  The War of the Worlds, published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann, opens with a sentence that has unsettled readers for over a century: "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." H. G. Wells wrote those words not to thrill, but to disturb. He wanted his readers to sit uncomfortably in the position of the colonised.

  The novel follows an unnamed narrator in Surrey as Martian cylinders crash into the English countryside and tripod fighting machines reduce Woking to rubble. But the story Wells was really telling had nothing to do with Mars. It was about empire, evolution, and the uncomfortable question of what happens when a more powerful civilisation decides it needs your land.

  How did a science teacher from England turn a bicycle tour of Surrey into one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon? And why did a radio broadcast of it in 1938 convince part of the general public that an actual invasion was underway?

• 2. Writing Woking into Ruin

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  In 1895, Wells married Catherine Robbins and moved with her to Woking in Surrey. He spent his mornings cycling the countryside and his afternoons writing, and he was deliberately mapping the territory for destruction. He wrote in his autobiography that he "wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians".

  The novel was written between 1895 and 1897, serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan in the US in 1897. Wells was paid £200 for the serialisation, and Pearson's demanded to know the ending before committing to publish. The first cylinder lands on Horsell Common, close to Woking. The narrator watches the Martians emerge, watches a crowd approach waving a white flag, and watches the heat ray incinerate them. Tripods wipe out the human soldiers around the cylinder and destroy most of Woking.

  Woking has since claimed its fictional infamy as a landmark. A 23-foot sculpture of a tripod fighting machine, entitled The Woking Martian and designed by artist Michael Condron, stands in Crown Passage near the local railway station. It was constructed in 1998. Fifty metres further along the pedestrianised street, a concrete and brick representation of a Martian cylinder marks the same literary ground.

• 3. The Science Behind the Fiction

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  In August 1894, a French astronomer reported sightings of a "strange light" on Mars. Wells used this observation directly, imagining those lights to be the launching of Martian cylinders toward Earth. The scientific credibility of the novel rested on genuine contemporary debates, not invention.

  Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had described apparent linear features on Mars in 1877, calling them canali, the Italian word for channels. In 1895, American astronomer Percival Lowell speculated in his book Mars that these might be irrigation channels built by an intelligent civilisation supporting itself on a dying world. Wells published an essay on intelligence on Mars in the Saturday Review in 1896, working out his ideas about Martian evolution. Those ideas went almost unchanged into the novel.

  Wells chose Mars as the source of invasion for a specific reason: scientists of the time wrongly assumed Mars was older than Earth, which meant Martians would have had a longer evolutionary history and would therefore have developed far more advanced intelligence. One of Wells's teachers during his science training in the latter half of the 1880s was Thomas Henry Huxley, a major advocate of Darwinism. That education shows in every page.

• 4. The Coloniser Colonised

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  Wells later explained that the seed of the novel came partly from thinking about the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. In the preface to his collected works in 1933, he wrote that The War of the Worlds was "another assault on human self-satisfaction", written consciously under the influence of Jonathan Swift.

  Some historians have argued Wells wrote the book to push his readers to question the morality of imperialism. The mechanism is elegant and unsettling: in the late 19th century, the British Empire was the predominant colonial power on the globe. By making the British home counties the site of invasion by a technologically superior empire, Wells forced British readers into the position of those their own empire was displacing.

  The invasion literature genre that preceded Wells had imagined foreign European armies attacking Britain. Between 1871 and 1914 more than 60 works of fiction for adult readers described invasions of Great Britain. The original was The Battle of Dorking in 1871 by George Tomkyns Chesney, a story of a surprise German attack that sold 80,000 copies as a pamphlet within a month of its May 1871 publication in Blackwood's Magazine. Wells borrowed the geography of that genre, with Southern England in ruins, but replaced the human invader with something that made the moral point impossible to escape.

• 5. Death by Bacteria

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  The Martians do not lose the war to human resistance. When the narrator walks into the ruins of London expecting to be killed and approaches a stationary fighting machine on Primrose Hill, he discovers that all the Martians are dead. Earthly bacteria, to which they had no immunity, killed them.

  The irony is precise and deliberate. The Martians' longer evolutionary history gave them intellectual and technological superiority, but it also meant they had no exposure to the microbial world that Earth's shorter evolutionary history had produced. The red weed the Martians had spread wherever there was water had already begun dying before the narrator reached London. The ending refuses any triumphalism: the narrator suffers a nervous breakdown, and the novel closes on the humbling realisation of Earth's vulnerability and the possibility of another invasion.

  The novel also works through a chapter in which the narrator observes the Martians in their cylinder pit and learns that they feed on blood drawn from humans and appear to communicate by telepathy. Their bodies, as described, have already evolved away from biological complexity: an enormously enlarged head and brain, two large eyes, a beak mouth, on an octopus-like body with whip-shaped tentacles. Wells had already sketched this trajectory for humanity in his 1893 essay "The Man of the Year Million", first published in The Pall Mall Gazette on the 6th of November 1893, which imagined humans evolving into huge-headed, body-shrivelled beings dependent on machinery, their emotions replaced by a cooperative intellect.

• 6. What Came Before and After

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  Robert Potter, an Australian clergyman, published The Germ Growers in London in 1892, describing a covert alien invasion by beings who take on human appearance and plan to deploy a virulent disease for global conquest. It was not widely read, and Wells's novel is generally credited as the seminal alien invasion story.

  Wells is credited with establishing several extraterrestrial themes that later science fiction writers expanded greatly: first contact and war between planets. Six weeks after The War of the Worlds appeared, The Boston Post published an unauthorised sequel. Edison's Conquest of Mars, written by Garrett P. Serviss, described the inventor Thomas Edison leading a human counterattack on Mars. Both it and the unauthorised American serialisation it followed first appeared in the Boston Post in 1898.

  The publication brought the term "Martians" into popular usage for hostile aliens of all kinds. The 1938 radio broadcast narrated and directed by Orson Welles, presented as a live news programme with events unfolding in New Jersey, caused a sensation, convincing part of the general public that a Martian invasion was actually ongoing. The 1953 film produced by George Pal, directed by Byron Haskin, and starring Gene Barry won the Academy Award for special effects. As of 2025, the novel has inspired eight films, and in 1978 Jeff Wayne produced a musical album of the story featuring Richard Burton and David Essex. An immersive experience set to Wayne's score opened in London in 2019, blending virtual reality, volumetric holograms, and live theatre.