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.

Wars of invasion were very much upon the minds of people in Great Britain, and in other major nations of the world, during the late 19th century. Would Germany invade Belgium? Would the Austro-Hungarian Empire invade Serbia? But only the visionary mind of H.G. Wells was able to extrapolate from those fears of his time to imagine something even more seemingly unthinkable – an invasion of the Earth by hostile, technologically superior beings from another world – in a way that would capture the imaginations of countless thousands of readers, from Wells’s time to our own. Welcome to The War of the Worlds (1898).

In our time, Wells is best-known for his classic works of science fiction – works that, in his own time, would have been called “scientific romances”: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The First Men in the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906), and of course The War of the Worlds.

The basic principle in that time – as with many science-fiction works now – was to take what was known from the science of the time, extrapolate from that science, and use that imaginative leap as the basis for a suspenseful story. But because Wells was a thinker of such enormously wide interests, well-versed in history and philosophy as well as science, works like The War of the Worlds went far beyond the “scientific romances” of their time, and continue to thrill and fascinate the readers of today.

The narrator of The War of the Worlds is an unnamed writer of considerable accomplishment and wide-ranging interests – a man much like Wells, come to think – whose peaceful and contemplative life in a quiet corner of Surrey is forever changed when a cylinder, constructed by beings from another world, crashes in a nearby part of his home county, opening a crater where it fell. Wells’s narrator begins his story by recalling ruefully how ill-prepared the people of the Earth were for this event:

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, 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. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. (p. 1)

It is, or course, conscious and deliberate that Wells links arrogant humankind with the microscopic organisms that were relatively new objects of discovery and interest for the scientists of that time – elsewhere in The War of the Worlds, the narrator refers to these creatures as “the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this Earth” (p. 103). The major nations of the world – then, as now – competed for power and influence; and meanwhile, “across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to 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. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment” (p. 1)

The Martians emerge from the cylinder and quickly demonstrate their hostile intent, spreading death and destruction through the power of a Heat-Ray. A full 62 years before the construction of the first laser device, Wells posited the idea of a new kind of weapon – “A beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch; lead runs like water; it softens iron, cracks and melts glass; and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam” (p. 15). Generations of creators of “ray-gun” books and movies owe an incalculable debt to Wells.

It quickly becomes clear that the British armed forces – while well-prepared for a possible war against an earthly enemy like, say, the German Empire – are all but helpless before the Martians and their Heat-Ray. And the destruction that the Martians wreak with their Heat-Ray is increased exponentially, once the Martians in their craters have constructed their tripods – vast war machines with which the Martians can cover territory even more quickly than the tanks that would see action 20 years later in the Great War.

The narrator is utterly shocked by his first sighting of a Martian tripod:

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. (p. 27)

In narrative terms, The War of the Worlds goes back and forth between what the narrator witnessed in Surrey and what his brother saw happening in London. Both eyewitnesses would agree that “Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal” (p. 32). Indeed, while the Great War was still twenty years away, a modern reader of The War of the Worlds, contemplating Wells’s description of the Martians’ indiscriminate killing of soldiers and civilians, of peaceful cities being made the targets of military violence, might well find his or her thoughts moving from Wells’s Martians to the guns of August 1914.

Those parallels with the First World War take on additional force when one reads about how another weapon in the Martians’ arsenal is poison gas. The Martian tripods, it turns out, carry canisters that deploy a chemical weapon that the narrator refers to simply as “the black smoke”:

These canisters smashed on striking the ground – they did not explode – and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes. (p. 54)

Part of what impressed me, on this re-reading of The War of the Worlds, was a renewed sense of the predictive power of the book. It is not just that Wells’s novel looks ahead to topics like poison gas, or the laser, or mobile war machines that prefigure the development of tanks. A 21st-century reader might be just as impressed by Wells’s description of how the Martians bring with them a “Red Weed” – a strange form of red vegetation that grows in profusion wherever there is a water supply, and that chokes out all the Earthly vegetation around it. The term “invasive species” may not have been much in use in Wells’s time, but this aspect of The War of the Worlds certainly looks ahead to the global problem of invasive species today.

People are undone by the invasion; the truths and philosophies that they have depended on all their lives can no longer sustain them. A curate, who takes shelter with the narrator in an abandoned home after the Martians have destroyed the town of Weybridge, moans with self-pity; in response, the narrator angrily calls upon the curate to “Be a man!” and adds that “You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent, man” (p. 43)

The house in which the narrator and the curate have sought shelter is later struck and destroyed by a Martian cylinder, trapping them, for a time, in the ruins. Before long, the narrator gets the chance to see a Martian for himself:

They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies – or, rather, heads – about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils – indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell – but it had a pair of very large, dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body – I scarcely know how to speak of it – was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our denser air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whip-like tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. (p. 77)

As if the description of the Martians was not chilling enough, what we subsequently learn of their eating habits is even worse. The narrator recalls how the Martians “took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins” (p. 78). The narrator, who saw the Martians carrying out this process, insists that he can’t even bear to describe what he saw: “Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal…” (p. 78) It is details like these that make The War of the Worlds a truly disturbing novel – a classic of horror as well as science fiction.

On the chance that there is someone out there who doesn’t know how the novel ends, I will take care to avoid the need for a spoiler alert. I will say only that Wells adroitly scatters clues throughout the early parts of The War of the Worlds, preparing the reader for a resolution that affirms the narrator’s declaration at one point that “By the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright of the Earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain” (p. 103).

Throughout The War of the Worlds, Wells’s descriptions of the Martians’ literally bloodthirsty behaviour are meant to remind the reader of humankind’s distressingly regular demonstrations of a metaphorical thirst for blood. Near the book’s beginning, the narrator, looking back on the interplanetary war, writes that “before we judge of [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought”, and “not only upon animals, such as the bison and the dodo”. Citing the killing of almost all of the Indigenous people of Tasmania, “in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years” – Wells’s narrator asks implacably: “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” (p. 1)

And near the conclusion of The War of the Worlds, the narrator writes, more hopefully, that “Surely, if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity – pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (p. 92). If the world has not yet learned that lesson, or any sort of meaningful lesson about compassion – as the grim record of the twelve decades since the publication of Wells’s novel would seem to indicate – then the blame for that failure cannot be laid at Wells’s feet. Few writers, of any era, have been more prolific in their presentation of plans for social improvement and global peace.

The War of the Worlds is, purely and simply, one of the most influential novels ever written. Orson Welles’s panic-inducing 1938 radio-broadcast version of the novel is very fine, as are the film adaptations by George Pal (in 1953) and Steven Spielberg (in 2005); but there is no substitute for returning to this singularly powerful and disturbing short novel.

This book surprised me. It's far from being a cheesy look at ray guns, flying saucers, and beings who say lines like, “Take me to your leader.” No, The War of the Worlds reads like, dare I say, realistic fiction. There is an aura of believability throughout its pages. An academic or elevated take on the genre, so as it was in 1898.

The story? Well, it's pretty straight-forward. Martians crash land on Earth and destroy everything and everyone in their wake. But it’s much more than that. The narrator deals in speculative philosophy, so it reads like a bloke questioning what he is seeing and inferring what he knows about science and the world to arrive at logical conclusions. Now, if this sounds sort of drab, I understand. Some readers might want more bits of action or survival sequences, and although this has them, they are not the focus of the story. The focus is on the overarching reason why the Martians are here and what their goals are, rather than just trying our best to obliterate them and move on.

I really appreciate the focus on using street names and locations around England to paint the picture. The words are detailed and succinct, but they also have a bit of literary whimsy to make the writing not feel overtly wooden. The Martian description is fairly unique as well. Again, everything is more or less driven by technical details, so that may be a turn-off for some seeking something a bit more sensational or dramatic. The characters are pretty sparse as well. I enjoyed the framing on the theme of human vulnerability, survival, and the limits of knowledge at the time, even if the singular relationships suffer a bit.

n  || “The chances of anything manlike on Mars are a million to one.""n

Save it for a rainy day, in-between an X-Files sesh, or when you get a hankering for a classic. It will surely not disappoint.

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.

This was a lovely book. I was expecting something much simpler (as I wasn't very impressed by The Time Machine), but this turned out to be very strong and interesting. First of all, who could say no to a world of aliens with scary death machines and yet also a world where they use bicycles to escape from them? (and I imagine those would be the large-wheeled curious ones, and not our typical bikes). Then, also a world in which monsters come from another planet, and yet, there is pretty much no real working airplane, quite yet. It's a marvel. For me, what was most puzzling was to try to understand just how innovative the author was to be able to imagine alien technologies almost of the same level as in today's movies, yet without all the accompanying technology we have to compare it with and get our inspiration from, when the author at that time hadn't seen any of it - quite simply because it didn't even exist yet. Can you believe that the man made up machines that have scarcely changed in fiction since his time..? That everyone a century later still writes almost about the same things, and nobody managed to quite go out of their league as much as he did? That is utterly amazing. And perhaps it's because this book was written almost in the 20th century (short of a few years, really), maybe that's why it feels so strangely contemporary.. But I still say that H.G. Wells was very far ahead of his time.

Classic alien invasion story if not the first.
it's the best remembered. H.G Wells writes proper first person dialogue. It does ramble and I believe the narrator went crazy and killed the cleric. Humanity panics and flees. Just to have the alien die of native disease. Which was proper thinking of the time. It has only been fortified by science since. But we really don't know. Think of the bacterial life that arrives on astroids. Anyway if you have not read this. Go ahead what are you waiting for.

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.

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

This was not anything like the Tom Cruise movie so be warned. If you’re expecting an action story about a divorced union container crane operator with a 10 year old daughter you ain’t gonna find it here. They changed like 99% of everything around. As far as I could see there are only two things which are the same, one is that the Martians attack Earth in these COOL THREE LEGGED METAL 70 FOOT HIGH HEAT RAY KICK ASS DEATH MACHINES and two is that they die in the same way which I won’t say here because that would be a giant spoiler but really it’s a bit feeble but I guess could happen because they came from Mars which don’t have bacteria. I don’t do biology so I don’t know if a whole PLANET can not have bacteria. Seems like also they couldn’t have had YOGHURT as well, but HG Wells does not make this clear. Nor Stephen Spielberg either. Now this book version I think is not the book of the movie, I think it came first so that may explain why the movie is better, because really this book is lame. Yes more realistic because like the main guy is no Tom Cruise, but less action. What happens is that the Martians land and like fry everyone up with the DEATH HEAT RAY and send out the BLACK SMOKE to finish off anyone left alive and the main guy hops around and hides and eats really gross stuff and just sees stuff. As for instance he sees the army get a lucky shot in and kill the one single Martian but then like his buddies just wipe out the whole British army. Boom, heatray zzzzz – GONE! Oh yeah the book is set in England which I thought was strange. Why not America like the movie? Anyway just when the guy has realized that from now on we’re just going to be MARTIAN FRENCH FRIES and kept in cages (when not heatrayed) then the Martians just like shrivel up and die. End of. So, in my opinion, I say watch the movie. Or you could go for the prog rock version, lol. Oh I guess I did give away the end. Okay, SPOILER – sorry. But everybody knows this story. It’s like saying oh in the end Dracula dies with a steak in his arse. It’s a known fact.

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.

Another 'template' book that has influenced so many other forms of artistic expression. I have to admit I think of this book every time we collect samples from secluded places; is anyone thinking about the impact that a germ/virus could have on us if the wrong 'thing' got loose? Several of my friends have mentioned the eerie similarities between this classic novel and our current experience with COVID.

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.