The War of the Worlds by H G Wells

This book from 1898 has been one of the more influential books of the last 100 years. There have been several movie adaptions including the Tom Cruise vehicle a few years ago that was quite successful. Most of us have heard the story of the panic caused by a reading of the story on a New Jersey radio station in the nineteen thirties. As people tuned into the channel they could not differentiate if this was a story or an actual news reporting.


In the story we have an unnamed author telling of a Martin invasion of England. Cylinders fall on England and it soon becomes apparent that inside these cylinders are aliens. These aliens quickly subdue the humans who are in their vicinity. Humans who are innocently curious to those with more aggressive motives are all laid waste with the heat rays and disabling black clouds that the aliens possess.


Our author in his escape leaves his wife in a village called Leatherhead wiht plans to return to get her but in the story he never does get back. We see him in his travails, coming into close contact with the aliens, being fortunate enough to survive some chance encounters, and also meeting up with various survivors and other refugees.

A story like this will always have an audience. We, as humans, are prone to wondering about other beings. Just last year the physicist Stephen Hawking advised that our attempts to send messages to outer space might well be a fools errand. His reasoning, that aliens that do travel to our solar system would most likely not be coming on a friendly mission and we might not want to attract their attention.

One of the more interesting aspects of the story is Wells writing for the main character that features him wondering if the human race now will suffer what the lower creatures on Earth have felt since mans rise. That is are we now just rabbits and ants to the martians and if so is that a just retribution for our treatment of lesser creatures.

Another is that the method of the defeat of the aliens. Certainly not one you would obviously think about, and certainly not the traditional victory method, but one cognizant of scientific realities or at that time theories it actually makes significant amounts of sense in the way it is presented.

This is another fine book. I will now have to, at some point, have to read The Invisible Man to complete my H G Wells lessons but he certainly deserves his place in the pantheons of great writers.