It's a shame that the first time I read this, it was a class assignment for high school. Being forced to read something for school is a far cry different thing than choosing to read something of your own volition. Being forced to read saps the joy from the experience. (Not always, but I'm sure some of you can relate.

Having recently read this, I was swept away by the story. The main thread is initiated by what is believed to be a "meteor" landing on Horsell Common in Great Britain. The main character lives nearby in order to narrate the events, firsthand, which are needless to say, remarkable. The meteor was an artificial cylinder sent from Mars. When a concerted effort is made to communicate, the group is incinerated by some form of advanced technology. The military responds by surrounding the cylinder.

After borrowing a dogcart from the neighbor to take his wife to Leatherhead and supposed safety, our MC returns in order to make good on his loan. He witnesses for the first time a three-legged fighting machine that shoots heat rays and spits a black smoke chemical weapon. When the nameless MC arrives to return the cart that he borrowed, he is too late. The neighbor is dead along with the army that had surrounded the pit. There is a ton more action and horror that pervades this classic novel.

A few years ago, my rating would have recognized the book as classic, but I would have missed the nuances that are very much alive in the text. Despite the action-adventure aspects of the tale, there are subtle and profound contrivances that include British colonialist themes. I'm so happy that I picked this classic book up, again.

Written in 1897, The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories about mankind and aliens. Many consider this book to be the inception of the science fiction genre.

This story is relatively straightforward: An unknown man is going about his life in jolly old England when aliens invade, causing chaos and destruction. How will this story end? Will humans overcome the aliens or will they all be captured, killed, or enslaved?

The War of the Worlds starts off smashingly. HG Wells doesn’t need a 100-page warm up. The action starts flowing from the start. Also, there are some very humorous bits. It is quite easy to see how with the humor amplified, this could turn into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The War of the Worlds seems so realistic in many ways. In fact, on October 30, 1938, there was a radio broadcast that adapted The War of the Worlds, changing the invasion point from England to New Jersey. People who listened on the radio actually thought that it was real!

Although the story started strongly, I became bored around the halfway point. Some of the sentences and paragraphs were way too long. We can only store so many words in our short-term memory. If you write an extremely long sentence, people will forget the beginning by the time they reach the end. Modern guidance suggests 15-20 words per sentence. It appears based on my Google Search, that around the time of Wells the average sentence averaged 20-30 words. However, Wells has sentences which are greater than 100 words!

This style of writing is difficult to read, and I appreciate how literature has evolved (Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Blake Crouch).

Additionally, Wells gets a little too far off the path with the copious descriptions of the aliens: the organs and the clothing. As Philip Pullman warns, the author must not leave the path. “The reason for this is simple: if you leave the path, the readers put down the book.” With this, I wholeheartedly agree (especially combined with the massive paragraphs).

Overall, I admire HG Wells for his inspiration into future works of science fiction. Of course, the Flesch Reading Ease score had not yet been developed at the time that Wells authored The War of The Worlds.

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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A famous story. In some ways it feels dated. Then I remember a radio play about the story was taken seriously by thousands and caused a mass panic. Some were prepared to poison themselves. There are those who still fear something along the lines of this book could still happen. The obsession with the idea of end times is pushed by a number of churches and by Hollywood.

Since a boy I have always been arrested by some of the final lines of the novel:

And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians - dead! - slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

4.0 Stars
I have been known to be hit or miss with classics, but this one definitely worked for me. The alien invasion plot was described in such terrifying detail at the beginning. I found the later section a little less engaging, but the epilogue brought it back together. I highly recommend the audiobook (narrated by Simon Vance) which really brought the story to life. This is definitely one I will reread.

h.g. wells vs writing sexist, racist garbage.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter...

At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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.

Going into this reread, H.G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds, which tells the story of an 1890s alien invasion of England, was one of my favourite books of all time. I remember holding this book in my hands as a kid and reading part of it while waiting in the back of my mom's car as she shopped at a department store, and I have always remembered a scene in the book involving an old wooden carriage wheel. It turns out the book didn't really hold up (it's no longer one of my favourites now, but I will always love it for nostalgic reasons, as I adored it from childhood for so many years), and I'm not sure why I remembered the carriage wheel; there were a few very brief scenes in the book involving a carriage wheel, and they're so insignificant. Of all the things that happened in this book, why did I hold onto such a trivial one for so long? Memory is a funny thing.

There were some great aspects to this book, like the numerous genuinely chilling scenes. In one, a Martian feeds on a human being. Some others involve the tripods attacking and the madness/growing insanity of some of the characters as the invasion dragged on and got worse. I also think the ideas of sophisticated alien invaders with Heat-Ray weapons and metallic tripod fighting-machines were way ahead of their time when this was written (1897), so from an ideas perspective this book is legendary, and it obviously made an enormous impact on and heavily inspired the science fiction genre.

Unfortunately, however, there were a lot of things I didn't like about the book during this reread. For example, the excessive use of the words "tumult" and "tumultuous". I swear those two words must have been used two hundred times in this book.

And there is one major, glaring plot hole in this book: the humans not just attacking the Martians when they first land, but instead waiting for them to build their fighting-machines (tripods) before trying to attack them. Why would you do that, when that is a fight you'd obviously lose (puny antiquated artillery guns against sophisticated alien Heat-Ray weapons that can lay waste to entire forests and towns in seconds)?

There are also numerous scenes in this book where the humans literally just stand around listening to the Martians building their fighting-machines, and watching them do it, for hours or even days straight, without doing anything at all. Why the hell wouldn't you just attack them while they're doing that? Wells goes to great lengths to describe the aliens themselves as slow-moving, weakened and sluggish because of Earth's greater gravitational forces; they're only powerful when they're in their machines, essentially. So why don't you stop them while they're exposed in the open and are weak and slow (i.e. easy targets), instead of waiting until they've built their powerful machines and can absolutely crush you? It makes no sense.

And the one-dimensional, endless name-dropping of numerous cities, towns, and buildings within a single paragraph or even a single sentence got a bit annoying the more it happened, as it offered no depth or world-building around the places mentioned. An example of this is:

Northward were Killburn and Hampstead, blue and crowded with houses; westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond.

How many is that? Nine places, that he mentioned in that short paragraph. And no real meaningful description or expansion on any of them. It doesn't add any value, as far as I'm concerned.

There was also a secondary storyline involving the protagonist's brother, which took up a decent amount of the book, and that storyline didn't interest me. And regarding the ending: I personally feel the fate of the Martians in this book is one of the most anticlimactic endings/resolutions in all of literature. That being said, there were some other parts of the ending that I really enjoyed.

Iconic and legendary, but for me disappointing after a modern day reread, H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is essential reading for science fiction fans and fans of influential fiction in general. It's one of the finest alien invasion stories ever told, but it can be very dry, uneventful, and tedious in places, so readers should know what they're getting into. The good news is that if you do decide to give it a try and you don't like it, it's only just over a hundred pages long, so at least it won't take long to get through it.

3.5 stars

More and more I have become interested in reading the predecessor classic novels like The War of the Worlds. Shamefully, this was actually my first H.G. Wells books, and although I have seen the movies, there is nothing like reading the book itself. After researching, I realized that Wells book is not the first science fiction novel, but I’ve noticed hints of its influence within the pages of other novels I’d read (from Kim Stanley Robinson to Stephen King).

It is also relevant to horror and fear, and I don’t think it’s lost much of its edge in that category. Evidently, Orsen Welles scared the crap out of a lot of people in 1938 during his radio broadcast using a modified version of The War of the Worlds. Since then, we have learned a lot more about Mars. Back in the late 19th century, the pictures and knowledge of the planet were fuzzy. I like that Wells used his big imagination to strike the imagination of readers. His vision of the Martians and their attack on our world is outstanding. Within the story there is also a personal story. The book speaks to human loss, but also to hope and triumph.

Because I love time travel novels, I surprised even myself by choosing this as my first Wells novel, over The Time Machine. I listened to The War of the Worlds by audiobook. I tend to miss more by audio. For those of you like me, I think reading is the best choice.

This is supposed to reflect the anxieties of Victorian England about being invaded,and even when the attack is finished,the author cautions that another invasion is possible.

There is an irony here.It was England itself which had occupied so much of the globe,and it is mankind that has managed to reach Mars.And had it encountered any Martians there,wars would have been waged on Mars,just as they always have been on earth.

It is not a pleasant book to read.It is all about disaster. Possibly the first major book about alien invasion of the earth,something I've grown tired of,given Hollywood's obsession with it.

Wells describes the chaos after the invasion well,as social order is destroyed.And guess what defeats the Martians,earth's pathogens just the way they are attacking humanity now.

The Martians don't need to sleep,they can be active all the time,they don't need the distraction of sex to procreate,they live on the blood of living creatures and they are all intelligence.Sounds pretty efficient.

A novel idea for its time,but I can't say it fully held my attention.Would have liked it to be shorter.

2.5 stars

With all of the recent talk about Mars, one has to be reminded that this novel was written 120 years ago and by someone who had little formal training but great curiosity, facts that cause The War of the Worlds to stand as an even more impressive achievement. H.G. Wells was destined for a life as an apprentice in the trades during the Victorian era in Great Britain when social mobility was almost nil.



Yet, having been accepted at a school that admitted some bright working class students and under the tutelage of T.H. Huxley, Wells's great curiosity was whetted and he was driven to excel, using his considerable imagination to construct novels & non-fiction works, many of which continue to fascinate readers. Wells even co-authored a Biology textbook with Huxley, his former tutor and someone whose keen study of science and promotion of modern ideas caused him to be called "Darwin's bulldog".

What captured my interest with this rereading of a classic book was the manner in which Wells looks at the looming catastrophe that besets the people of Woking, a small English village, eventually expanding to London & potentially the entire civilized world when cylinders from the planet Mars crash into the rural English countryside. Initial curiosity & a sense of disbelief are quickly transformed into toxic fear & general chaos as the local police & even the Cardigan Hussars prove to be no match for the squid-like Martians that crawl from the cylinders and their quickly devised tripods unleashing deadly rays.

When I first came upon this story by Wells, it was via a Classics Illustrated booklet with wonderful graphics and the suggestion at the end that one should next pursue the original edition, available at one's local library, which I did somewhat later, being an easy mark for stories set in far-off countries and even those extraterrestrial adventures even farther beyond one's home. Reading The War of the Worlds much later in life, I was much more attracted to the words Wells employed to drive his story.



Specifically, he uses two different visions in the novel, one microscopic and the other telescopic. The author uses his knowledge of microbes and how the bacilli that have long beset humanity with various diseases and plagues ultimately vanquish the Martians. Beyond that, he employs his own interest in exploring the solar system as a context for setting a story that few in the late 1890s could have envisioned.

Wells also implants various characters, each of whom reacts to the Martian menace in a different manner. There is for example, an extremely addled cleric who acts as a foil for the main character & who is eventually slain by him while they are both holed up in the remnants of a house destroyed by Martians. But, the author also distinguishes between what he labels "fetish, heathen prayers" and a more validly focused kind that might serve to bring one through a crisis. The narrator comments that he had come "face to face with the darkness of God."

Another character, an artillery man comments that "the game is up & we are beat--cities, nations, progress, civilizations, it's all over." And yet, this fellow speaks of attempting to preserve books & scientific knowledge, eventually hoping to master the Martians.

It is said that Wells himself fluctuated between a cautious optimism and a persuasion of looming, irretrievable global disaster. I enjoyed reading this tale again, attempting to imagine how the author's original readers might have reacted and being familiar with how Orson Welles fashioned The War of the Worlds into an American setting, one that set many in the U.S. on edge via a radio dramatization in 1938.



There is a point when Wells has the narrator come to the realization that he has felt...

like a rat leaving his hiding place, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim, our masters might have hunted & killed. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominions.

There are some fairly obscure words within the novel and a rather constant notation on the towns, streets & byways traversed by the Martians and those fleeing in their wake. My edition included a convenient map to use, much as one might while traveling about London and the U.K. and I found this helpful.

In a forward to my edition by Brian Aldiss, it is indicated that H.G. Wells was never really accepted by intellectuals, who never took to the author as a "literary force." Aldiss indicates that Wells was serious but also liked to have fun, enjoying wine & women but that the literary establishment "lacked his claret & his clarity", not a bad summing up in my view.

In 1933, Wells wrote a fantasy work with "futurist implications", The Shape of Things to Come, but in no way anticipated the horror of Nazi Germany, WWII & the Holocaust. As George Orwell put it: "He got many things wrong, being too sane a man to anticipate or understand 20th century craziness, with the world having outstripped his imagination".

*Within my review are photo images of: H.G. Wells; the cover of the Classics-Illustrated edition of War of the Worlds; and the image of Wells creating a mini-war games scenario, perhaps a precursor of today's war-game videos.

**A very interesting article on H.G. Wells, Passion & Prophecy: The War Within H.G. Wells, written by Adam Gopnik, appeared in the November 22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, with emphasis on Wells' rather open approach to sexuality.

"The War of the Worlds" is an exciting first-person narration of a man who witnessed the Martians invading the Earth. Cylinders containing the Martians were shot from Mars and landed in England. The British army was defenseless against the Martian Tripods, three-legged fighting machines fitted out with a Heat-Ray and chemical "Black Smoke". The book was written in 1898, prior to World War I, but the Martian weapons were similar to lasers and chemical warfare. Wells uses the ideas of Darwin to describe the Martians who had evolved to possess huge brains.

Great Britain was a colonial power when this book was published, so it was a turnabout to read that Great Britain was being attacked by a civilization far superior in technology. Streams of refugees were fleeing from the invaders. Rumors and confusion existed in the era before rapid communication.

It's not surprising that "The War of the Worlds" has been adapted into films, comic books, games, and radio dramas. People thought that a 1938 radio drama by Orson Welles was a genuine news broadcast which incited panic in some American listeners. This science fiction classic is full of suspense and kept my interest.

"As if hell was built for rabbits!"

The book counts no more than 180 pages in my edition, but I read it over a whole month. It was entirely intentional. I didn't want to be done with it.

The War of the Worlds is amazing and innovative and incredibly modern in so many respects, but I just want to point out here Wells's incredible (literally--as in, it defies description and you can't really understand what I mean until you experience it) skill in dynamic descriptions. He plays with the characters' visual perspective in ways that I thought had become available to literary fiction only with the advent of cinema. Like a consummate landscape painter, he manipulates light effects (he has a preference for backlit scenes and intermittent light that allows to see only details of the whole and only at intervals) and impediments to vision with astonishing self-awareness, but adds to this mastery of visual composition the ability to put these effects at the service of the dynamism of narrative. Very few, or possibly nobody, had tried before to describe alien forms of life in the extremely realistic way Wells does here in The War of the Worlds, which meant he had to invent from scraps the language and techniques to do it. And the result is breathtaking beyond comprehension.

Chapter 17 is emblematic in this respect. The narrator's brother sees the Martians wading into the water towards the ship where he's embarked; a warship called Thunder Child engages them in battle. The character sees the Martians from a distance, meaning that the description is hazy, but also all the more terrifying because of this. While he is absorbed in morbidly admiring the advancing Martians, the ship tosses and he falls. When he looks up again, the warship has just surpassed his ship, so that he sees the immense warship from very up close, which means (again) that he has poor and not at all clear sight of it, but (again) the lack of detail makes the whole sequence very evocative. The character is then blinded by the water and foam that the warship has sprayed up; when he can see again, the warship and the Martians are already engaged in combat.

I am well aware that I wasn't able at all to render the magnificence of the passage, but believe me if I say it's one of the most visually stunning, controlled and at once emotionally charged pieces of prose I have ever encountered. And such mastery of prose and narrative vision is just the tip of the iceberg of Wells's genius, too vast for me to explore here. I can't but passionately urge you to pick up The War of the Worlds and experience this absolute delight for yourself.

By the time I finally read The War of the Worlds during my junior year of high school, I'd been familiar with it for a long time, thanks to the Great Illustrated Classics, the creepy 1953 film, and, most memorably, the iconic Depression-era radio broadcast narrated by Orson Welles. It's a testament to the power of The War of the Worlds that familiarity failed to dull its impact, even a bit. This archetypal story of interplanetary conflict overwhelmed me. It seized my attention and demanded to be read in one marathon sitting. It frightened and disturbed me. It filled me with wonder and awe. Turning the final page left me simultaneously relieved and sad that it was over.

Looking back, I think the underlying theme of the smallness and transience of mankind helped make War of the Worlds such a vertiginous experience for me. At sixteen, I was science savvy enough to understand that our earth is a mere speck orbiting a spark in a universe of incomprehensible immensity. I already understood that the whole span of human civilization, to say nothing of our individual lives, occupied but a blink of cosmic time. But Wells had a gift for making you feel what you merely knew. He had a way of reminding you that the safety and stability we take for granted can vanish in an instant, that the most routine activities of the most mundane day can be fraught with the seeds of catastrophe, and that our knowledge will always be dwarfed by our ignorance.

For all the hundreds of emulators The War of the Worlds inspired over the past century plus, I doubt there's a novel or film on a comparable theme that even comes close to rivaling it. H.G. Wells was a genius, and this book was one of his greatest achievements.

Regarding the famous radio adaptation, it supposedly caused a mass panic when it broadcast in 1938, with thousands of naive listeners mistaking the narration for an actual news report about mysterious alien invaders incinerating cities with their heat rays. But research has apparently debunked this claim as an urban legend. Maybe it doesn't speak well of me, but learning that made me sad. Some things should have happened.