While I have seen several movies that were made based on the book ‘The War of the Worlds’, I have never read the original novel the movies are based on. OMG! I’m slapping myself on my forehead. I really really really should have read it long before this! What a terrific story! Author H. G. Wells rules!

I have copied the book blurb:

”A metallic cylinder falls to earth, landing in the sands of Horsell Common, Surrey, generating curiosity and awe. But what’s inside soon induces only terror. The story that unfolds is a breathless first-person account of an inconceivable reality: an extraterrestrial war has been waged on the planet.

In a twist on cautionary turn-of-the-century invasion literature, H. G. Wells posits the Martian attack as an insurmountable apocalyptic event. The first of its kind and a foundational work, The War of the Worlds inspired a radio broadcast, television shows, graphic novels, and countless films; roused the imagination and stirred anxieties; and changed the landscape of science fiction for generations.”

Wells’ prose is incredible! I had forgotten how well he writes. The book holds up despite that it was written more than a century ago. The book is spookily predictive of what people would do in a sudden attack in which bombing and troops suddenly overwhelm a community without much warning. The first-person narrative by an academically-minded middle-class man without any real experience of war or soldiering felt real to me. Wells’ main character is not extraordinary or with special talents. He’s just a guy, with expectations of an ordinary day, who is suddenly in the middle of an apocalypse without any explanation or reason for it for many days. All he really has to defend himself is self-control and common sense - all of which he doesn’t possess all of the time when he is scared out of his mind, starving, without water or weaponry. He must make impossible decisions that cause him moral injury, too. Wells leaves nothing out in this story.

No matter who does the invading, people would react much like Wells imagined imho. I don’t think today’s technology would much change how people would respond emotionally any different than what Wells posits in his well-written book. The invaders are heartless in their killing, and vast numbers of people die because they cannot defend themselves adequately against an enemy with greater weaponry, but some victims survive, seemingly serendipitously. Many people pray to God for deliverance and die anyway, and some go insane with their perception of God’s betrayal of them, letting them die painfully in horror. Many people create wild impossible or insane theories of why this is happening because of an inborn human inability to accept what is happening to them. Those with a lot of money and resources who are taken unawares in their homes or in the street are indistinguishable from poorer people during the invasion, just better dressed. For awhile. Until survivors of the attacks discover the lack of any way to clean oneself or protect oneself from the ruined environment and weather makes itself known.

Wells got everything right in ‘The War of the Worlds’ despite writing a fictional war story written in an era without televisions, drones, and modern communication devices, and in a country at peace at the time without an actual invasive ongoing war in its neighborhoods. Wells’ imagination and intelligence from his writing shows him to possess a brain of enormous predictive creativity and scientific/psychological knowledge and self-awareness.

Electricity in our 21st century would be turned off in a planned invasion, putting us on equal footing with Wells’ characters in their 19th-century setting. We Americans have seen the cars stuck in unmoving traffic jams when authorities recommend evacuation before a hurricane or, in other countries, a military attack, on television and on our computers and cellphones. Wells’ characters struggle to evacuate on roads blocked with carriages, carts and people carrying their precious goods on 19th-century versions of wheeled carryalls and grocery carts. We’ve seen the results of riots on our televisions - individuals are attacked and viciously abused, houses and buildings for miles of city blocks and businesses are robbed and burned down. The communities bombed during any war, including the 19th century, are almost indistinguishable from one wrecked by a hurricane or a flood or a riot - the horrors of which we Americans have seen on television or experienced. Because of drone cameras and courageous journalists with cellphones, we have seen the destruction of war going on in other countries on our televisions and computers too.

I highly recommend this AWESOME realistic novel!

My goodness this is a brilliant book! Despite being one of the early waves of science fiction it is still a beautifully written thrilling read.

While to a modern science fiction reader it may seen like 'speculative fiction' or even 'space opera' due to the (comparative) lack of hard science in the story, I think that for 1897 when it was first published it actually contains a very respectable amount of science. There are astronomy speculations, machinery is described in ways that are pretty detailed and advanced for the day. Mass spectrometery (though not called by that name) is used to describe the metals brought to earth by the Martians and when you consider that this discipline was first introduced 1918-1919, some time after this book was published I think there can be no doubt that H. G. Wells' book is beyond doubt a definite science fiction. In fact Wells was a trained science teacher in his day and had had the noted biologist Huxley as his own teacher. Huxley was an impassioned advocate of Darwinism and his proposed principle of evolution through natural selection. I think it is clear that Huxley inspired H. G. Wells, as evolution and natural selection are evident throughout this book where our protagonist theorises about the process of evolution which may have reduced the Martians to enfeebled bodies reliant on machinery as well as in the final defeat of the Martians by bacteria to which they had no developed immunity.

The writing style is lovely, smooth beautiful literature, descriptive of both the invasion, the social implications and the inner life of our unnamed, first person narrator. Within the context of invasion literature, a type of writing that has always been and remains popular - this novel stands out for it's time in how little it has dated. Dating is a problem in older books, because the author brings his culture with him into the novel, so H. G. Wells has dated a little in his lack of female lead characters, but beyond that I would say it has not dated at all. In fact, as a novel set in a historical time frame it has not even dated in the matter of gender - in the era the women would have been rushed to safety, leading our protagonist to struggle along as he does. In all other ways it is so skillfully written that it comes across as almost contemporary, much more so than some more recently written science fiction.

At the end of the day it is the skillful writing and delightful narrative that make this a joy to read - as much as I love the science fiction invasion theme. It is in the descriptions of abandoned, ruined London lying eerily quite under the terror of the Martians and the chocking red weed - this is so evocative and lyrical that I feel ashamed it has been so long since I read this novel. Brilliant, way ahead of it's time and a pure delight to read in every paragraph.

For Australian readers out there there is an story behind the book; H. G. Wells claimed that the plot came to him during a discussion with his brother on the genocide (at the time considered a complete genocide) practiced by British imperial forces on the indigenous Tasmanians. What would happen, he wondered, if Martians did to Britain what the British had done to the Tasmanians? Partly because of this acknowledged source, this novel (considered a 'romance' in it's time) can be considered a criticism of British imperialism, among other things.

Desde que terminé de leer los libros de la saga “Trilogía Victoriana” de Félix J. Palma, con H.G. Wells y sus libros como protagonistas absolutos, me quedó la espinita de leerme algo de Wells.
La historia es archiconocida pero me ha encantado leerla de la mano de su creador.

Me ha gustado el tono de caos y desolación que presenta la historia y el hecho de que no sepamos el nombre del narrador me parece un acierto total. La explicación final de que los marcianos mueren debido a los virus y bacterias de la tierra me ha parecido magistral. Siento que es un libro que nunca va a pasar de moda.

Mención aparte merecen las estupendas ilustraciones de Alvim Correa que me han acompañado en la lectura. Son una maravilla. Por favor, si es que le ha puesto ojitos a los trípodes marcianos ¿puede haber algo más cuco? XD

The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The War of the Worlds, the classic of alien invasion and interplanetary paranoia by H.G. Wells. Published in serial format by Pearson's Magazine from April 1897 to December of that year, the story originated after the author's relocation to the town of Woking in Surrey County. It was here that Wells also wrote his comic novel The Wheels of Chance, as well as The Invisible Man, which has now been replaced as my favorite Wells invention with this one.

The novel begins on a warm summer's night in June and unfolds from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, an academic in the field of philosophy who lives with his wife in Woking, southwest of London County and bordered on the north by the River Thames. A celestial alignment of Mars, Earth and the sun has generated much interest by members of the Astronomical Exchange, among them Ogilvy, a well-known astronomer and friend of the narrator's.

Ogilvy believes the possibility of life on Mars to be absurd. The narrator isn't so sure about that. Early in the morning, a "falling star" is reported in the skies over Berkshire, Surrey and Middlesex. Ogilvy tracks the descent of what is assumed to be a meteorite to a "common", or public land, near the town of Horsell. Climbing into the sand pit where the object has been buried, Ogilvy discovers a huge cylinder, which he determines to be hollow. He runs to get help and news quickly spreads of "the dead men from Mars".

While Ogilvy and a few other men from the Astronomical Exchange begin to excavate the cylinder, the narrator clings to rational thought, doubting there might actually be any intelligent life inside. He's dispatched to secure fencing needed to hold back the crowds that have begun to converge on the site. The narrator returns at dusk in time to witness the cylinder open. Expecting to see a man, onlookers are aghast at their first glimpse of a Martian in the flesh:

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon group of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.

A deputation including Ogilvy approaches the pit with a white flag in an attempt to communicate with the Martians. The party is met with what the narrator refers to as a "heat-ray", a flash of light which leaves the men charred and distorted beyond recognition. The narrator manages to flee the massacre and returns home to his wife. He's confident that the episode may all be a big misunderstanding and trusts that a company of soldiers heading to the site will sort everything out. Meanwhile, a second shooting star lights up the sky.

By afternoon of the next day, guns are heard firing and the narrator observes damage to the spires and chimneys about town. Concluding their home is now in range of the Martian heat-rays, the narrator procures a horse and dog cart from the local pub owner, quickly fills it with valuables and spirits his wife to the town of Leatherhead, where her cousins live. He insists on returning the horse and cart as promised, but upon his return to Woking that night, encounters a pair of giant Martian tripods stepping through the pine trees.

Higher than many houses and dangling steel tentacles, the tripods use their heat-ray to destroy the horse and cart. Through the hail and lightning of the dark, the narrator makes out the shapes of tripods on the march through the English countryside. Seeking shelter at home, he briefly takes in a soldier who initially can only mutter "They wiped us out--simply wiped us out." In the morning, the narrator sets out in search of his wife in the middle of, not a war, but the extermination of mankind.

The War of the Worlds is one of those classic tales that through more than a century of radio, television and film I was sure that I knew. Initially, Wells' typically British stoicism and reserve -- the narrator witnesses his mates microwaved by a Martian death ray and returns home, composes himself and tells the little lady it'll be quite all right in the morning -- kept me removed from the story. It was headed toward two stars and a box checked next to "War of the Worlds, Wells, H.G."

I caught up to the novel at the end of Book One, when the Narrator fishes himself out of the Thames and takes on a companion, a parish priest convinced divine retribution is at hand. The men become unwilling partners, plundering houses for food until a Martian cylinder crashes nearby and traps them. The story became much more thrilling through here, with the danger up close and personal. Instead of running, the narrator is able to study the Martians for the first time, uncovering unpleasant facts of the invader's diet.

Wells' "man on the street" reporting -- adapted by Orson Welles for his infamous 1938 Halloween radio broadcast -- has a unique way of putting the reader right in the middle of an invasion with a remarkable amount of verisimilitude. The heroics exhibited by his narrator are thankfully limited to his ability to stay alive and observe the enemy up close, as well as use his knowledge of the humanities to give what he's experiencing context.

-- Wells cites the names of so many towns and villages that a tourist could probably find their way around London by reading this book.

-- Next to New York, London has been destroyed by more science fiction writers than any other city. Panic takes the heaviest toll in The War of the Worlds. The scenes where the narrator wanders the empty city, certain he's the last survivor, were chilling.

-- The biology and technology of the Martians are ingeniously drawn and truly menacing. I haven't seen an alien in film or television in quite some time that were as designed as well as the Martians.

-- Wells does take an unnecessary detour, shifting focus to the narrator's brother as he flees the siege of London by poisonous black smoke, but even here, Wells' impeccable writing style kept me hooked:

In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii. We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift.

I found the depictions of how rustic the England of Wells' day truly was to be captivating. Most of the country is connected by rail, but once you left the train stations, you were in the 19th century, with horse cart, carriage or bicycle the best options for travel. Without telephone, television, radio or aircraft to provide news, the reader's imagination is allowed to run amok between pages and fill in the details of the invasion.

This classic 1898 science fiction novel has teeth to it, and it’s not just the Martians. The War of the Worlds is a lot more thoughtfully written than I had remembered. In between deadly heat rays, huge tripod machines striding around the country killing everything in their path, and bloodthirsty Martians trying to take over Earth (starting with Great Britain), there's also critique of colonialism, religious hypocrisy, and even how humans treat animals. The ways in which people react in a crisis is given just as much attention as the Martians' actions.

I read this when I was a teenager, but for whatever reason I didn’t get much out of it at the time. But I let myself get roped into a GR group read of it, partly because it's so short. And also because my literary diet needs more classics. And you know? I'm glad I did.

Upping my rating from 3 stars to 4.5 on reread, partly in recognition of how advanced this book was for its time in some of its concepts, and the influence it's had on the SF genre.

Group read with the Non-Crunchy Classics Pantaloonless crew.

Me costaron mucho trabajo los primeros capítulos porque no me gustan las cosas de alienígenas, pero después, la verdad es que se convierte en una historia casi de terror con todas las descripciones de muerte y destrucción. Hay escenas super tensas en las que el protagonista se está escondiendo de los marcianos y siento que muchísimas películas han intentado replicar (me vino a la mente the quiet place por ejemplo). Impresiona muchísimo que este libro se haya escrito en 1898, cuando lo empecé y leía las descripciones de los ataques pensaba: seguro el autor se inspiró en la Primera Guerra Mundial, PERO LO ESCRIBIÓ ANTES! Insisto, aunque las historias de invasiones alienígenas no son mi tema, reconozco que La Guerra de los Mundos caminó para que muchas de las historias de terror y ciencia ficción que conocemos hoy pudieran correr. Vale la pena. (Gracias a Marina de mi club de lectura por proponerlo porque si no nunca lo habría leído).

Muy buena historia. El estilo de la narración es perfecto. Me atrapó por completo. Sólo soltaba el libro cuando tenía que dedicarme al trabajo. Lo leí pausadamente, proyectando en mi mente las imágenes tan nítidas que describe el autor. Para el momento en que fue publicado (1898), un libro como este tiene un tono de premonición. No por la posibilidad de una invasión extraterrestre (que nunca hay que descartar), sino por lo que se esconde en el fondo: la inminencia de la guerra, la catástrofe, la muerte... En varios puntos el autor, más que hablar de la invasión como una cosa singular que se produjo por culpa de los marcianos, se refiere a lo sucedido como resultado de la «enfermedad de la guerra», que nos afecta a todos los seres humanos y también a los demás seres del universo, seguramente. Ahora entiendo el sentido del título. Pudo llamarse de mil formas diferentes que enfatizaran más el tema de la invasión extraterrestre, pero el autor escogió a propósito la palabra «guerra». Esta es la verdadera protagonista. Deja reflexiones muy importantes sobre su efecto en la naturaleza humana.

"Las obras de Mr. Wells pertenecen, sin duda, a un tiempo y un grado de conocimiento científico futuro muy alejado del presente, pero no completamente fuera de los límites de lo posible."
Julio Verne

Ya lo he afirmado en reseñas anteriores. La capacidad de anticipación a la tecnología y el futuro que tenía Herbert George Wells era ampliamente superior a la de Julio Verne a punto tal que el visionario francés lo admitía sin reparos.
Pero además de esta característica tan marcada en sus novelas, Wells nos alertaba sobre los posibles peligros que involucraba a la tecnología en poder de los hombres, sobre los riesgos de los avances científicos y los alcances de la ciencia sobre el planeta.
Sumado a esto, es importante reconocer también que Wells profundizaba en el costado psicológico del ser humano ante tantos cambios inesperados y en cómo el hombre tiene que lidiar con estos.
En tan sólo cuatro años, Wells había escrito cuatro novelas inolvidables: "La guerra de los mundos", "El hombre invisible", "La máquina del tiempo" y "La isla del Dr. Moreau", lo que demuestra su poderío narrativo que perdura aún hasta nuestros días.
"La Guerra de los Mundos" no es solamente un libro sobre la invasión de la Tierra a partir de la llegada de los marcianos. Tiene muchos elementos más que la hace una novela muy entretenida para ser tan corta y, como comentara anteriormente, nos muestra otro costado: el de la reacción del hombre ante la pérdida de su libertad.
A lo largo de la historia, hemos conocido acerca de las distintas invasiones y en todas ellas el patrón común es precisamente ese, el de la libertad perdida. Usualmente pondemos el ojo en el vencedor, pero no prestamos atención al vencido o dominado y en cómo influye en éste el hecho de ser sometido en todos los aspectos.
Es sobre esa faceta en donde Wells ahonda el desarrollo de su novela, porque para ser sinceros, si reemplazamos a los habitantes de la tierra, por ejemplo con un ejemplo cualquiera, por los polacos, luego de la invasión nazi en 1939 a Polonia, veremos que ese sufrimiento es similar al que nos cuenta el narrador de esta historia.
La opresión que viven los habitantes de la Tierra puede compararse a la de este pueblo o a cualquiera que haya experimentado un suceso similar.
Para ello y a la par de lo que sucede con la caída de los distintos cilindros a Inglaterra, Wells comienza a relatarnos las reacciones de los hombres que sufren el asedio y de cómo va esto trastocando su vida.
Durante el transcurso de la novela nos encontramos con grandes diferencias entre los seres humanos como sucede entre el narrador y el cura y también con el artillero. Estas distintas maneras de pensar nos llevan a un contrapunto interesante.
En primer lugar descubrimos que insólitamente la falta de fe y esperanza repercute totalmente en el cura, que es casualmente quien por su posición ante precisamente esa fe es quien más debe reconfortar al débil. En este caso no funciona y creo que se debe a una crítica que Wells entabla hacia la Iglesia como constitución.
Desconozco si era o no creyente pero pude notar que por momentos el narrador (que es tal vez un Wells encubierto) nos daba una imagen paranoica, frágil y temerosa de alguien que supuestamente debe mostrarnos exactamente lo contrario.
En el caso del artillero, se desarrolla una personalidad completamente opuesta. La de aquellos hombres que bajo la influencia de la invasión a la que están sujetos intentan tomar partido para su beneficio o pactando secretas sumisiones a cambio de una traición a los suyos o en otros casos queriendo intentar una represalia que es imposible llevar a cabo y es ahí en donde el autor pone al descubierto nuestras defectos, ambicione o debilidades como personas.
El punto del artillero es de todas maneras muy válido, pues éste pone de manifiesto que la supervivencia de los seres humanos está ligada directamente a que entendamos que, ante un dominio tan brutal como el que ejercen los marcianos, éstos estarán unidos o dominados. En nosotros está descubrir la verdad.
Un dato interesante que descubrí durante el tramo final de la segunda parte es que los marcianos comienzan a rociar toda la zona con un una nube letal negra, principalmente en la ciudad de Londres que en ese libro equivale a la Nueva York de las películas de Hollywood, y este detalle me recordó a la de la nevada mortal con la que comienza la mítica historia gráfica de Hector Oesterheld en "El Eternauta". Tal vez, a partir de esta novela haya habido algún tipo de inspiración en el autor argentino para desarrollar su historia.
Para finalizar, simplemente dejo una pequeña reflexión e interrogante, ya que sabemos que esto es ficción, que la ficción es justamente la creación de mundos a partir de la realidad, que se han escrito muchos libros sobre el tema y que se filmaron centenares de películas pero, si un día nos despertáramos con la noticia de una invasión extraterrestre...
Tú: ¿cómo reaccionarías?

It just occurred to me that the ending is remarkably similar to the one in Disney's The Sword in the Stone. You know, the magic duel between Merlin and Madame Mim - she cheats and turns herself into a dragon, but he then wins by turning himself into a microbe. I wonder if it's a random coincidence, or if H.G. Wells gave them the idea?

One of my favorite movies growing up was the old War of the Worlds movie – the ‘50’s film, not the itty-bitty Tommy remake. I had to watch it each and every time it played on television. The same running dialogue would go on inside my head: “Cowardly dudes, don’t wave that white flag, they’re Martians, they’re probably color blind or something."



"Oops, too late, you’re toast.”

Or “Maybe the A-bomb will work this time. Nope, you’re toast.”



I also liked to imitate the heat ray sound when I re-enacted the movie later:

“Dododododoodododoodleydo”. It was a combination of a yodel and the sound the cat would make when its tail would get caught under the rocking chair.

“Dododododoodododoodleydo”. Barbie’s dream house is toast.

“Dododododoodododoodleydo”. You can’t use the Barbie car to escape, Ken, you sexless loser. *imitation explody sound as the Barbie car and Ken go up in a ball of flame*

“Dododododoodododoodleydo”. GI Joe, Batman, a Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em robot, and a one-armed cowboy hurl a huge pillow from the sofa at the Martians, thus ending the invasion. Get your asses back to Mars, bitches.

For Wells, this was a pioneering book, its tropes were to be dug up and used over and over again. Wells does here as Wells does in his other books – throws in some social commentary: If the British lorded over much of the known world back then, foisted itself on “lesser” cultures, why could it not get it’s comeuppance by being stomped around by a more powerful foe – in this case, obese, slow-assed, turd-like aliens from Mars.



This was a buddy read with those Pantless connoisseurs of fine, classic literature and is another example of a classic book that doesn’t suck donkey balls.

Fully understand how impactful and influential this book may have been… but I was beyond BORED. Kinda liked the ending - that’s it. Maybe it was just the relief that it’s over

Günümüz bilim kurgu kitapları ile kıyaslarsanız biraz sıkıcı gelebilir. Ancak yazıldığı yılın 1895 olmasını göz önüne alarak okursanız, bu tarihte uzay yolculuğu, uçaklar ve lazer silahlarınsan bahsediyor olması muazzam.