The War of the Worlds Add a review

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 humankind 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.

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. 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 War of the Worlds has never been out of print: it spawned numerous feature films, radio dramas, a record album, comic book adaptations, television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It was dramatised in a 1938 radio programme, directed and narrated by Orson Welles, that reportedly caused panic among listeners who did not know that the events were fictional.