While it may seen inhumane to all the stockbrokers and their dependants, there is some vicarious pleasure to be had in the destruction of Surrey commuter towns by the Martians. The fear, confusion and rapid break down of late Victorian life following on from the initial attack is striking.

The War of the Worlds is one of those science-fiction books that are full of contemporary fears - it is a pre World War One invasion fantasy like The Riddle of the Sands but with the German army transformed into the Martians. Zeppelins and U-Boats transformed into striding tripods and heat rays.

The sun may not have set on the British Empire but the fear of destruction lurks everywhere. For Childers and Wells the threat is external and military rather than internal and social. Eventual victory doesn't represent change - just the continuity of militarism. As a vision of Imperial Britain's place in the world it is incredibly narrow and fearful - the application of fight or flight as the only choices in international relations, but as events a few years later would show this was a way of seeing the world that was widespread across Europe.

An interesting feature, particularly maybe from the perspective of empire, is that the aliens are not defeated they self-destruct in an accelerated version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Martian Empire - if you are going to keep your empire, mere technological superiority is not enough, one needs inner vigilance too otherwise you'll dive into decadence and start mixing your bodily fluids with sub-Martians, then before you know it - you are bird food. For once then, eugenics turns out to save us all.

3,5/5

It's easy to be a jaded reader of science fiction, especially if you grew up with the conveniences of Star Trek, Star Wars, and the reality of spaceflight. So it's important to remember that writers like H.G. Wells never got to see the famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth; they never got to see what our planet looks like from space—something most of us take for granted in this era. This awareness, our conception of the Earth as a big blue marble, has become so pervasive as to make descriptions like this seem ... odd:

...our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

(Emphasis mine.) Wells didn't grow up with the Apollo missions; he only dreamed of men walking on the moon. So to write a story about Martians invading Earth, one saturated with speculation that uses the most cutting-edge science available to him in the 1890s, is all the more amazing and deserving of praise. The War of the Worlds is not a novel of the ages because of its story or characters—indeed, it lacks both—but because it is a testament to the power of one's imagination.

It's a good thing The War of the Worlds is short, because a book at any length in this style quickly becomes dull. The first thing that struck me is how Wells names so few of his characters. I'm pretty sure under ten characters in the book are named, and all of them are killed off in the first couple of chapters. The narrator and his wife go nameless; supporting characters are simply identified as "the boy" or "my brother," "the curate," "the artilleryman." That's not to say the characters lack personalities. Although none seem three-dimensional, Wells takes the time to invest the main characters with a cynical sort of human nature: the narrator vacillates between misguided optimism and extreme pessimism; the brother soon finds his own altruism erode in the face of Martian-induced anarchy; the curate goes mad; the artilleryman seizes upon impractical, Nietzschean visions. In a way, the dearth of names is appropriate to what Wells accomplishes: set pieces, scenery with dialogue, rather than actual characters decorate the scenes of The War of the Worlds. Through these inanimate beings, Wells shows us how he thinks civilization—because this is Britain, after all!—would behave during an apocalypse.

The narrative itself is extremely procedural. In addition to the nameless characters, who lend to the narrative its feeling of an anonymous article recounting "the terrible Martian invasion," the narrator often goes off into clinical descriptions of the events that befall him and his own interactions with the Martians. This book is all tactics and no strategy.

No, where Wells truly excels is his portrayal of the Martians as the Other and his exploration of how humanity reacts to the invasion of the Other, to absolute and utter catastrophe. The Martians never parley with humanity, neither to threaten nor to deliver ultimatums. They are taciturn and methodical, ruthlessly organized in their effort to dominate the Earth. Our entire understanding of them is predicated on the narrator's perception, on his perhaps fallible assignation of thoughts and desires to the Martians. They are, he supposes, doing this out of a need to survive—Mars being a dying planet—but it's worth noting that this is total supposition; for all we know, the Martians were utterly malevolent and their planet was fine.

The Martians certainly bring out a certain malevolence in humanity. There's no shortage of books that show the dark side of humanity, of course. But the alien invasion story is unique because of its ability to render us, as a species, totally impotent:

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heels. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.

This is not the first time Wells compares us to animals; earlier in the book he compares his initial underestimation of the Martians as tantamount to the dodos' lackadaisical attitude toward the first sailors on Mauritius. However, the sentiment doesn't truly sink in until Wells' narrator re-encounters the artilleryman, who sums it up: "We're beat.... This isn't a war. It never was a war, anymore than there's war between man and ants."

From here, the book briefly digresses into a dim vision of humanity's future under the heels of the Martians. The scary thing is, I can see it happening. Our greatest strength as a species is how adaptable we are—but that strength can also be a disadvantage. Civilizations have grown comfortable under the rule of tyrants (just don't ask for the recipe for Soylent Green...); I was ready to envision humanity under the Martians.

It's worth remembering too that this all happens, and was written, before World War II. But does this sound familiar?

It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.

Finally, everyone knows how the story ends, even though few people probably even read the entire book: the Martians are felled by tiny, microscopic bacteria, because "there are no bacteria in Mars." Of all the science in this book—much of which is accurate, by the way, if not precise—that is the most ironic statement, for scientists currently searching for life on Mars, past or present, are focusing on finding that life under a microscope. So fortunately for us, I don't think the Martians will be aiming their rockets at Earth anytime soon.

“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 scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize 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…”
-tH.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Many Halloweens have come and gone since I first purchased H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, intending it to be part of my seasonal reading. There it sat, with many other good literary intentions. With this book in particular, I never felt any urgency. That’s a function of how many derivative versions I’ve consumed. I’ve seen the movies, the television adaptations, and the parodies on The Simpsons. I’ve also listened to a recording of Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio broadcast.

In short, I felt a nagging duty to read it, but nothing more.

Having finally finished The War of the Worlds, I discovered that in some ways, the experience was superfluous. This is a short novel, coming in at around 200 pages, and it doesn’t have much in the way of plot. It is quite episodic, and the various filmed versions of this tale have ably captured the major beats. In other words, there wasn’t much left to surprise me, at least in terms of how it all unfolds.

What did surprise me was its execution. For all the meanings heaped upon Wells’s slim book, it is first and foremost brutally entertaining. This has the gloss – and sentence structure – of a classic. But at its heart, it’s really just a pulpy clash between aliens and humans.

***

A summary of The War of the Worlds is probably unnecessary. Suffice to say, at the end of the nineteenth century, cylinders from Mars begin burying themselves in the soil of Great Britain. From these cylinders emerge big-brained Martians, who immediately begin building war machines, which are then turned loose upon poor England.

The story is told in the first-person by an unnamed narrator. We never learn too much about him – characterizations are not a strong point here – except that he is a philosopher, and that he is married. Most of The War of the Worlds consists of the narrator’s own experiences as he tries to get back to his wife. Somewhat awkwardly, however, Wells also has his narrator spend time relating his brother’s travails, even though he wasn’t present for them. (There are some truly great scenes involving the brother, yet I found this second storyline a bit of an authorial cheat).

With our narrator as a guide, the reader is taken on a tour of a section of blasted-out Great Britain that really sets the bar for all the postapocalyptic fiction to follow. Showing an absurdly keen appreciation for local geography, Wells has his narrator travel from Woking to Weybridge, Weybridge to Halliford, Halliford to Putney, Putney to London, and so on and so forth. Along the way he witnesses battles between massed artillery and alien tripods; scrounges for food; gets trapped in a house with a raving curate (perhaps the most gripping set piece); and exchanges philosophical musings with an artilleryman who has lost his unit (and possibly a few marbles).

Wells’s descriptions – as has been widely noted elsewhere – eerily prefigure the mechanistic slaughters to come in both the First and Second World Wars. There is poison gas and shattered cities. There are mass exoduses of terrified civilian populations, with rioting and looting in the streets. Though this is not graphic in the modern sense, Wells writes with a certain unsparing ruthlessness. In one memorable scene, a British ironclad engages in a suicidal delaying action in the River Thames.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she was already among the Martians…They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through paper…

The evocation of total warfare and its aftermath is impressive, and Wells seems to take a bit of pleasure in fictionally destroying his real-life neighborhood.

***

Far more than most novels featuring aliens and Heat-Rays, The War of the Worlds requires close attention. This was published in 1898, and it shows. Wells employs a rather ornate, formal style, with long, compound sentences that often try to do too much. Occasionally, I had to read a page twice to understand what was actually happening (it can be especially hard to keep track of the unnamed characters). Despite its brevity, this took me longer to finish than expected. Still, there are certain sequences that have the taut pacing and tension of a thriller. Furthermore, while Wells can occasionally be a bit wordy, he uses those words to good effect, creating lasting images.

***

The War of the Worlds is one of those titles that is ripe for projection. Because it feels prophetic, there are many interpretations. The most obvious, of course, is that it is a critique of colonialism. After all, it features the world’s great imperial power being forcefully subjugated by a foreign invader. Wells pointedly suggests this himself in the text, referring to the Tasmanian people of Australia being “swept out of existence,” and then asking whether humans were “such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

This is all well and good, but it is worth mentioning that viewed from the twenty-first century, Wells has more than a bit of baggage. He was enamored of a certain construction of “natural selection” wherein all the “lesser” races would eventually disappear, a prospect he did not exactly mourn. Wells was also known as an anti-Semite, and some of that bleeds into these pages, especially in his description of an “eagle-faced man” who is run over by a fleeing cab while trying to pick up gold sovereigns that have spilled on the ground. For the most part, though, The War of the Worlds seems free of whatever reprehensible notions Wells carried. While there is definitely some Darwinian concepts interwoven into the narrative, the “natural selection” angle is played out vis-à-vis the conflict between humans and extra-terrestrials.

***

Science fiction has always been a marvelous vehicle for addressing real social concerns through entertainment. The War of the Worlds is no exception. As noted above, it can be seen as a criticism of imperialism, or of technology, or of any number of other things. Wells has built a foundation that can support many different structures. Steven Spielberg, for example, used Wells’s setup to create what is perhaps the best film to deal with America’s post-9/11 anxiety and dread. If you want to think deeply about it, you can. Based on the introduction to the edition I read, many have.

Just as importantly, you can choose to simply enjoy it – as I did – as the relatively lowbrow adventures of a man trying his best not to get blown up, while everything around him is spectacularly obliterated.

Uno de mis más vívidos recuerdos de infancia es una proyección de La Guerra de los Mundos (la versión de 1953) a principios de los años 80s, durante una fiesta por el Día del Niño que organizó una agrupación de jóvenes del barrio. Esta fiesta era un clásico anual y todos los años veíamos en Super 8 las mismas películas de Disney, Cupido Motorizado y alguna otra (eran las mismas películas que veíamos en las kermesses escolares por lo que supongo que no habría mucha variedad de títulos). Recuerdo como si fuera hoy el terror que me dió esa película y a mi hermano llorando a los gritos, al igual que varios de los chicos que nos acompañaban. Como soy muy ansiosa, terminé con todas las piernas arañadas y las uñas comidas. Finalmente terminó la película, prendieron las luces y aquí nada ha pasado. Chupetines gratis para todos.
Revisionar la película en la adultez me devolvió un poco la fascinación, y aunque entendí por qué me había aterrorizado, también descubrí que no era para tanto. No voy ni siquiera a dedicarle un párrafo a la versión de 2005 porque no lo merece.
Cuando empecé a leer esta novela después de muchos años en la lista de lecturas pendientes volví a sentir mucho del terror de mi infancia, aunque ahora en forma mucho más tangible. Los marcianos son más terribles y amenazadores que en cualquier versión en fílmico y las escenas de carnicería, hambruna y otros desastres no son aptas para niños. La lectura se me hizo compulsiva- y me volví a comer todas las uñas.
El final pierde la gracia por ya ser archiconocido, pero creo con sinceridad que he leído uno de los mejores libros de ciencia ficción que existen y uno de los mejores que he leído este año. Imagino que en la fecha de su publicación habrá causado una impresión tremenda y no me deja de sorprender la habilidad narrativa de Wells y su increíble inventiva.
Lamentablemente 15 años después de su publicación los horrores de la guerra real habrán disminuido el impacto de este gran libro, pero es el mejor comienzo que pudo haber tenido la literatura de invasiones extraterrestres.

Nel coglier il senso di terrore che giunge a sopraffare i protagonisti di questo romanzo, talora dimentichiamo di vedere, oltre l'ombra dellinvasione marziana a scapito di popolazioni inermi, le tante conquiste coloniali, gli atti disumani, la distruzione di intere civiltà e culture portate avanti per pura sete di potere e denaro. Ma è Wells stesso che, in più di un'occasione, attraverso sapie ti rimandi, provvede ad aprirci gli occhi e a far trasparire le nostre stesse colpe negli stessi atti che, leggendo, ci vediamo condannare.

One of the great classic horror stories. I remember reading this as a child and being terrified. Ahead of its time and thrilling.

من روائع هـ. ج. ويلز
مختلفه عن الفيلم كتير تفاصيل كتير جدااااااااااا احداث في منتهي الروعه

عبقريييييييه الروايه دي وكعادة الكاتب ديما يبهرني بطريقة تفكيره التقدميه واللي سابقه الفتره الزمنيه اللى كان فيها بمسافات طويله
عنده دايما خلفيه علميه عن كل موضوع بيكتب عنه زي رواية آلة الزمن اللى قرأتها ليه من فتره طويله وكانت اول كتاب اقرأه لويلز

وصف دقيق لشكل الآلات الخاصه بالمريخيين لدرجة اني بقيت مش قادره اتخيل المنظر دا والتفاصيل دي كلها في الفتره اللى هو فيها سنة 1898
الروايه مكونه من كتابين او جزئين الاول اسمه قدوم المريخيين والثاني اسمه الأرض في قبضة المريخيين

شخصية البطل هو كاتب المفترض معروف لم يقم بذكر اسمه يصف لنا البطل علي لسانه وفي كتابه ما حدث بالتفصيل من بداية رؤيته للمريخيين عند اول هبوط ليهم حتي سيطرة المريخيين علي الارض وقتلهم كل ما يقابلهم من كائنات حيه ومحاولاته للوصول لزوجته اللي وصلها عند ابن عمه في مدينه تانيه واعتقاده انها ماتت واعتقادها انه مات

واللي معتقد انه نفس قصة الفيلم بتاع توم كروز لازم يقرأ الروايه لانها وضحت حاجات كتير جداااا ما كانتش واضحه في الفيلم دا اولا وكمان الفتره الزمنيه مختلفه تماما فبالتالي الاحداث هتعتبر مختلفه تماما بما فيهم كمان البطل نفسه واختلافه الشديد عن بطل الفيلم

This was a re-read and it was still as good as the first time.

This novel must have been an incredibly unique concept when it was first published in 1898, with Martian vessels shooting out of the sky like falling stars, then rampaging across England in their death machines with advanced, unfathomable technology. It is easy to see how this story gave birth to a new genre and a plethora of novels after it.

I quite enjoyed the mix of an alien invasion with a late Victorian setting, especially the idea of people trying to escape them with horse and cart or in steam trains. While the style of writing lost me at many times, especially during the chapters where the narrator talks through the experiences of his brother without naming the man, the plot itself was captivating enough to pull me back in.

I somewhat lazily and arbitrarily clicked this book onto my "science fiction" Goodreads shelf, but it isn't, not really. Sure, the monsters happened to come from Mars, but that isn't essential to the plot. They could just as easily have come from deep under the ground, from the bottom of the ocean, or from Mordor. All the story requires is that they be from Somewhere Else, and Mars fills that bill perfectly well.

So, leaving aside the creatures' extraterrestrial origins, War of the Worlds succeeds on several levels. For one, it's one of the most gripping and legitimately frightening horror stories to come out of the 19th century; the intelligent, but overwhelmed and slightly unreliable narrator gives a desperate, panicky edge to the story. This suits the material perfectly: if you propose to chronicle the end of the world, a little panic goes a long way towards selling it.

The story also succeeds as an ecological fable. As the story repeatedly compares the Martian invaders to humans as humans would be to rabbits or ants, the usual human view of the world as a pyramid with ourselves at the top is thrown into a new light. This is typical of Wells, as The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau are also thinly veiled parables about the philosophical issues of his day. The difference is that, unlike the class warfare fable of The Time Machine, or The Island of Dr. Moreau's exploration of evolution and what makes humans human, War of the Worlds's message still seems relevant today.

For my money, this is H.G. Wells' best story, or at least the one that's aged the best. I was surprised at what an enjoyable and thought-provoking book this was - far better than any subsequent adaptations I've seen or heard. Accept no substitutes!

I swear that I read this when I was younger, but when I went to add this to Goodreads as a re-read (it was the January selection for my Completist Book Club), I did not find it in my list. And, because this is one of those books that has a plot people tend to know because of movies and/or its general pop culture relevance, it is difficult for me to know which parts of my memories of this are from the book and which are from other places. But, re-read or not, I am glad I read it in January 2022.

This is classic sci fi. It is easy to see how many parts of this led to the tropes we see in literary and cinematic sci-fi today. And it is pretty amazing the creativity Wells had for coming up with such vivid and scientifically based alien technology and biology. This book was way ahead of its time!

While the setting is late 1800s England (horse carriages, telegrams, etc.), it is not hard to picture this in a modern setting. Wells did a great job making the story timeless. Often when I read books set in this era, they may be good, but they can also feel dated – not a bad thing, it is just that time moves on. But, with this one, society may have advanced, but it did not feel like time had moved on.

If you love the classics and/or love sci-fi and you have not read this book, I feel like it is a must for you to get it on your list right away. I was leaning toward 4 stars on this book, but the classic status and the effect it has had on sci fi over the years push that up to 5 stars!