The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells about an attempted invasion of Earth by beings from the planet Mars with much greater intelligence and more advanced weapons than humans. The Martians intend to eliminate mankind and conquer Earth because their own older and smaller world has reached the "last stage of exhaustion". It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann.
The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother who escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London and Southern England are invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon. Its 1938 radio broadcast directed and narrated by Orson Welles caused a sensation, convincing part of the general public that a Martian invasion was ongoing.
Plot
The plot is similar to other works of invasion literature from the same period and has been variously interpreted as a commentary on the theory of evolution, imperialism, and Victorian era fears, superstitions and prejudices. Wells later noted that inspiration for the plot was the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. The story is told in the first-person with a narrator making his way about London as the invasion proceeds. Glimpses of destruction, his retreat, and conversations with other survivors drive the narrative.
Some historians have argued that Wells wrote the book to encourage his readership to question the morality of imperialism. In the preface to his collected works in 1933, Wells explained: "My early, profound and lifelong admiration for [Jonathan] Swift...is particularly evident in a predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions", adding "The War of the Worlds like The Time Machine was another assault on human self-satisfaction", both being "consciously grim, under the influence of Swift's tradition".
The Coming of the Martians
In the mid-1890s, aliens on Mars plot an invasion of Earth because their world is becoming uninhabitable. In the early 20th century, in the summer, an object thought to be a meteor lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. It turns out to be an artificial cylinder launched towards Earth months earlier, as Earth and Mars approached opposition. Several Martians emerge and struggle with Earth's gravity and atmosphere. The alien beings do not resemble humans and have an enormously enlarged head and brain, two large eyes, and a beak mouth, on an octopus-like body with long, whip-shaped tentacles for grasping and locomotion. When humans approach the cylinder waving a white flag, the Martians incinerate them using a heat ray. The crowd flees. That evening a large military force surrounds the cylinder.
The next night, the narrator sees a three-legged Martian "fighting-machine" (tripod), armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon that dispenses toxic smoke. Tripods have wiped out the human soldiers around the cylinder and destroyed most of Woking. The narrator approaches his own house and finds the landlord dead. He offers shelter to an artilleryman whose battery was wiped out attacking the cylinder. The narrator and the artilleryman try to escape but are separated during a Martian attack. As refugees try to cross the River Wey, the army destroys a tripod with artillery fire, and the Martians retreat. The narrator travels to Walton, where he meets a curate.
The Martians attack again, and people begin to flee London, trying to escape the deadly black chemical vapor spread by the invaders. The narrator's brother reaches the coast and buys passage to Europe on a refugee ship. Three Tripods attack, but a torpedo ram, HMS Thunder Child, manages to destroy all three, with the ironclad sinking shortly after the third tripod's destruction due to damage it sustained from the tripods' weapons. Fortunately, its effort was enough to allow the evacuation fleet to escape unscathed. Soon, resistance collapses, and Martians roam the shattered landscape unhindered.
The Earth under the Martians
In Book Two, the narrator and the curate witness a Martian machine seizing people and tossing them into a metal carrier. The narrator realises that the Martian invaders have plans for their victims. When a fifth Martian cylinder lands, both men are trapped beneath the ruins of a manor house. Hidden in the wreckage, the narrator observes the Martians in the impact pit and learns that they feed on blood, taken now from humans, and that they appear to communicate with some type of telepathy. The curate falls into despair. When he tries to eat their remaining food, the narrator knocks him unconscious. A mechanical tentacle probes the smashed house and removes the curate's body, but the narrator is able to escape and hide.
The Martians abandon the cylinder's crater, and the narrator heads for West London. En route, he finds Martian red weed everywhere, prickly vegetation spreading wherever there is water, but notices that it is slowly dying. On Putney Hill, he encounters the artilleryman, who is planning tactics for how humans can continue fighting the Martians after they control the world. The next day the narrator heads into the deserted ruins of London and hears a strange howling sound coming from immobile Martian fighting machines. On an insane impulse, he resolves to die and end his hopeless situation. He approaches a stationary fighting machine on Primrose Hill, expecting to be killed. To his joy and relief, he discovers that all the Martians are dead, killed by earthly pathogens, to which they had no immunity.
The narrator suffers a nervous breakdown. Returning to Woking, he finds his wife. In the following days, humankind gradually recovers and makes scientific progress from studying the Martian corpses and machines. However, there is still the humbling realization of Earth's vulnerability and the possibility of another invasion.
Background
Inspiration
Wells explained that he was exposed to the scenario of an empty and depopulated London almost simultaneously by a friend during a conversation and through the novel A Sensational Trance, by Forbes Dawson. Being attracted to the idea about writing a similar story himself, he tried to come up with a reason for why London was empty, and concluded the one that made the most sense was a mass exodus. When thinking about what could have caused the flight, he suddenly remembered his brother's idea about superior beings from another planet suddenly dropping from the sky. Wells's son Anthony West claimed another seed for the novel can be found in The Time Machine, where the narrator speculates about the possible future evolution of humanity, thinking it could have "developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful". Next, the picture came to him that the aliens would arrive in interplanetary cylinders, an idea he borrowed from Jules Verne's stories about spaceflight. When deciding from what planet, he picked Mars, both because it was the one most similar to Earth, and because scientists of the time wrongly assumed Mars was older than Earth, and therefore the Martians would have a longer evolutionary history than humans, having evolved into much more advanced creatures.
Wells was trained as a science teacher during the latter half of the 1880s. One of his teachers was Thomas Henry Huxley, a major advocate of Darwinism. Wells later taught science, and his first book was a biology textbook. Much of his work makes contemporary ideas of science and technology easily understandable.
Scientific setting
The War of the Worlds presents itself as a factual account of the Martian invasion. The scientific fascinations of the novel are established in the opening chapter. The narrator views Mars through a telescope, and Wells offers the image of the superior Martians having observed human affairs as though watching tiny organisms through a microscope. In August 1894, a French astronomer reported sightings of a "strange light" on Mars. Wells used this observation to open the novel, imagining these lights to be the launching of the Martian cylinders toward Earth.
Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described apparent linear features on Mars in 1877, wrongly supposing these were canali (Italian for "channels"). In 1895, American astronomer Percival Lowell speculated in his book Mars that these might be irrigation channels, constructed by a sentient life form to support existence on an arid, dying world. The novel also explores ideas related to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.
In 1896, Wells published an essay on 'Intelligence on Mars' in the Saturday Review, setting out ideas about life on Mars. Wells speculates on the nature of Martian inhabitants and how their evolutionary progress might compare to humans. These ideas are used almost unchanged in The War of the Worlds.
Physical location
In 1895, Wells married Catherine Robbins, and moved with her to Woking in Surrey. There, he spent his mornings walking or cycling in the countryside, and his afternoons writing. He used these bicycle tours to find places he would refer to in his novel. He wrote in his autobiography that he “wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians”. A high sculpture of a tripod fighting machine, entitled The Woking Martian, based on descriptions in the novel, stands in Crown Passage close to the local railway station in Woking, designed and constructed in 1998 by artist Michael Condron. Fifty meters further up the pedestrianised street is a concrete and brick representation of a Martian cylinder.
Cultural setting
Wells's depiction of late Victorian suburban culture in the novel was an accurate representation of his experiences. In the late 19th century, the British Empire was the predominant colonial power on the globe, making its domestic heart a poignant and terrifying starting point for an invasion by Martians with their own imperialist agenda.
Publication
In the late 1890s it was common for novels to be serialised in magazines or newspapers before publication in full, with each part of the serialisation ending on a cliffhanger to entice audiences to buy the next issue. This practice was familiar from Charles Dickens's novels earlier in the 19th century. The War of the Worlds was first serialised in the United Kingdom in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897. Wells was paid £200 and Pearsons demanded to know the ending of the piece before committing to publish it. The complete volume was first published by Heinemann in 1898 and has been in print ever since, although several editions exist. The 1924 Atlantic edition is considered the definitive text used for reprints. In addition, a revised version for schools was first published by Heinemann in 1951.
Two unauthorised serialisations of the novel were published in the United States prior to publication of the novel. The first was in the New York Evening Journal where the story was published as Fighters from Mars or the War of the Worlds, located in a New York setting, between December 1897 and January 1898. The second version had the Martians landing near and around Boston, and was published by The Boston Post as Fighters from Mars, or the War of the Worlds in and near Boston in 1898. Hughes and Geduld suggest that Wells may inadvertently have agreed to the serialisation in the New York Evening Journal.
Reception
Contemporary