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

„Война на световете“ е много хубава и смислена научна фантастика от Викторианската епоха! Хърбърт Уелс е описал по въздействащ начин страховито нашествие на марсианците в Англия в края на 19-ти век. Докато разказва мрачната и напрегната история, авторът същевременно умело критикува отрицателните черти на човечеството...



„Нима сме толкова големи апостоли на милосърдието, че да имаме право да се оплачем, ако марсианците водят война в същия дух?“

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!

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!

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.

Paraphrasing Whitehead, I would say that the safest general characterisation of the science-fiction tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to H. G. Wells. Indeed, The War of the Worlds is probably the most influential novel of the whole science fiction genre, as well as a significant part of the horror category. I remember reading this short novel as a child and being viscerally engrossed and terrified. Rereading it now made me aware of a few more things. First, I realised how this book sums up and, in a way, accomplishes some of the things H. G. Wells had experimented with before. To name a few: the Darwinian conflict between two similar species (The Time Machine), the fascination for freakish life forms (The Island of Dr Moreau), the chase around working-class London and its surrounding area (The Invisible Man).

It is possible that H. G. Wells’s remarkable book was perceived, at the close of the 19th century, as just a fin de siècle catastrophic story — similar to, say, Mad Max or Terminator at the end of the 20th. In hindsight, The War of the Worlds is much more than that. It is indeed the kernel and the seed of all the later tales of extraterrestrial invasion and tropes of apocalyptic destruction, from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood's End, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, Michael Faber’s Under the Skin, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation… Not to mention films and TV: Alien, Independence Day, and so many more that I forget as I write this short note.

What strikes me the most is that Wells depicts humanity in the shoes of the invaded party and pictures the invaders as an alien race of bloodthirsty molluscs — which, in itself, sounds like a veiled but stark criticism of Western imperialism and sense of superiority. But, as it turns out, Wells’s prophetic vision was not so much that of a War of the Worlds with extraterrestrial invaders, but precisely a vision of the World War between fellow humans, that would break out some twenty years later, with a technological arsenal not unlike that of the Martians (cf. mechanised artillery, chemical warfare, surgical strikes). Later still, when the Second World War began, and the Nazis were about to invade the whole of Europe, Orson Welles remembered this old tale about a Martian invasion. He turned it into an incredibly relevant radio sensation. The masses of refugees, described by H. G. Wells, fleeing the war in a disorderly and life-threatening manner is a sight anyone may witness even today, despite all the concrete walls or steel fences that are supposed to stop them.

In short, this is an unavoidable masterpiece. The only reproach I could make is regarding the ending. The deadly flu epidemic the Martians eventually suffer from feels a bit like a disappointing Deus ex Machina. As a side note: historically, things unfolded the other way around when Spanish Conquistadors landed on the shores of the New World. They didn’t win against the Aztec and Inca Empires so much because of the superiority of their weapons, religion or culture, but because they were bringing the smallpox virus along with them — the first major and unwitting case of biological warfare.

Edit: Wells’s novel has been brought to the screen a significant number of times, one of the most recent ones being Steven Spielberg’s adaptation (2005) with Tom Cruise. The film takes a few liberties with the book, setting the story in present-day Connecticut. However, one very clever unfaithfulness is that the aliens do not come from Mars but from underground (a nod to The Time Machine, no doubt). Spielberg isn’t new to the alien-first-contact genre. But this is an outright nightmarish and nail-biting take on what had once been a benevolent musical spaceship or a heart-warming horticultural E.T. longing for home — in this film, aliens also play the trombone and are versed in landscaping. Still, they spray their gardens with human blood. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds comes after the intense and graphic scenes of the Omaha Beach assault in Saving Private Ryan and is roughly in the same vein. Some scenes, like the innumerable bodies, suddenly floating down a glistening river, or the empty cloths raining from a blazing sky, are strangely beautiful and horrifying. In the midst of the gruesome devastation, Tom Cruise, Tim Robbins and Dakota Fanning are exceptional, playing the parts of regular people, suddenly overwhelmed with PTSD and facing the brutal ending of all things.

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.

The Martians are coming!

THE MARTIANS ARE COMING!!!

A-hem... Second on my list of all-time favourite classics to re-read this year is H.G. Wells' phenomenal 'The War Of The Worlds'. Contrary to popular belief, this book is not the first book about an alien invasion, but it is the first book about alien invasion that anybody but the most knowledgeable science fiction geeks will have heard of.

The plot is simple: Mars attacks Earth, us inferior humans can't do anything about it and then the Martians get wiped out by Earth germs because they have no natural immunity to them. It's a simple plot but plot isn't what the book's about.

The reason I love this book so much is because it does a fantastic job of showing how powerless humanity would be if attacked by extra-terrestrial beings. Stephen Hawking famously said that he hopes extra-terrestrial life doesn't find us because they would have to be much more advanced technologically than us and history has shown us that when a more advanced civilisation meets a less advanced civilisation it's pretty much always really bad news for the less advanced civilisation. As much as the Roddenberry fans among us might dream of peaceful contact between species from distant worlds, Hawking probably has a point.

This book was actually criticised when it was first published (serialised in a newspaper or magazine; I forget which) for being too graphic and, while it's pretty tame by today's standards, it was a lot closer to the knuckle than the vast majority of the works being published at the time. It's actually pretty gross in places. (That's not meant as a criticism.)

Some of it seems a bit silly to the modern reader, mainly because the knowledge we have of Mars and space travel and the like is much greater today, but if you can get past that you'll get sucked in.

The Martians may not be coming... because they don't exist... but somebody is probably out there... and, you never know, they may well be watching us... keenly and closely...

What's that bright green light in the sky? That's really weird... no, no... AAAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!

This iconic alien invasion adventure is so revolutionary forward thinking, every Sci-Fi film or tv show owes a massive debt to this story!

I’d imagine everyone would be familiar with either the 1953 or 2005 movies, there’s also the famous 1938 radio broadcast that caused a huge panic in America.
Those are all good adaptations, but what I practically loved about the book was the invasion starting in Woking!

London and the surrounding towns and boroughs are integral to the story, places that I’ve visited being attacked by extraterrestrial beings is my favourite type of Sci-Fi.

Told through an unnamed narrator, this story had originally being serialised in Pearson’s Magazine during 1897.
I can imagine readers of the time being desperate to know how the cliffhangers resolved themselves, it kept me wanting to read the next chapter.

The BBC are planning a new adaptation set during the Victorian era just like the original story, I’m now desperate to see it.
I just wished they’d announce an air date soon!

PLEASE SEE POSTSCRIPT

Well with GR telling me I haven’t read any books this year (doh !), I thought I’d finish my first.

In all seriousness this is a re-read because I want to go on to Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind, which is part of one of this years numerous challenges (why do I do this to myself ?)
Anyway GR says this is my 2nd read of this classic book (hah, what does GR know), whereas in fact it is probably my 5th or maybe 6th. To me it is certainly 4.5 stars and is enjoyable for so many reasons. The book itself is well written, as per usual from HG, it is not just a science fiction book but an in depth look or even examination of human nature and lastly I spent my childhood growing up and walking around the villages and countryside where the cylinders landed, so expected to see a Martian at any moment. How can I not like it, I know the roads the “writer” walks, cowers and scuttles along through the course of the story.
Let’s hope Mr Baxter can live up to this high standard with his authorised sequel.

PS I have added this postscript as some witty people have enquired if I was wandering the lanes and byways of this book with HG Wells. Now I maybe approaching my prime (cough cough) but I’m not Victorian

Okay guilty reading admission here - especially since I already have a couple of books on the go but I have recently been the War of the Worlds Immersive experience in London and I have to say that it re-fired my love for this story.

Yes many things can be said about the negative points of the story but for me this story has some remarkable connections from the first Science Fiction books I convinced my school to read and study in class the the musical version being played to death by my brother and the artwork in the vinyl version firing my fascination with science fiction and fantasy art.

So yes I raced through this book and regret none of it - there are some books regardless of what the world things of them that mean so much to us and I think the ability to stop and go back and appreciate them is something that should never been overlooked or dismissed.

The War of the Worlds belongs to the league of immortal books.
Tribal wars, civil wars, colonial wars… H.G. Wells managed to raise a phenomenon of war to the higher interplanetary level.

The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of noises – the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint, and pallid in the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.

Panic and terror… It is useless to fight back… The only way to escape is to flee and hide… And the horrendous invaders – gigantic extraterrestrial bedbugs – know no mercy.

Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman’s basket hangs over his shoulder.

Although the victory may come from an unexpected quarter but all the invasions sooner or later are doomed.