The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by the English writer H.G. Wells, serialized in 1897 and published in book form in 1898. It is narrated by an unnamed writer in Woking, Surrey, who witnesses the arrival of cylinders launched from Mars, from which emerge octopus-like Martians with vastly enlarged brains who rapidly assemble towering fighting machines armed with a heat ray and later a poisonous black gas, and who begin systematically destroying the surrounding towns and advancing on London. The narrator and his brother separately flee the collapsing south of England amid mass panic and the rout of the British military, until, with human resistance essentially broken and the Martians on the verge of total conquest, the invaders abruptly sicken and die, killed not by any human weapon but by ordinary earthly bacteria to which they had no immunity. Widely regarded as one of the earliest and most influential works of alien-invasion fiction, far overshadowing the handful of earlier stories on the theme, the novel is also read as a pointed commentary on European imperialism, imagining the British Empire itself on the receiving end of a technologically superior invasion; its most famous adaptation, Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatization, notoriously convinced some listeners that a real Martian attack was underway.