Novel: The War of the Worlds

Overview
H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel follows an unnamed narrator in Surrey and his brother in London as Earth faces a sudden invasion from Mars. Told as a sober eyewitness account divided into two books, it charts the swift collapse of Victorian Britain under superior technology and the unexpected biological twist that ends the conquest. The tone blends scientific curiosity with mounting dread, using precise observation to give the incredible events a chilling plausibility.

The First Cylinders
Strange bursts seen from Mars precede the landing of a metal cylinder on Horsell Common near Woking. Onlookers, treating it as a curiosity, gather around. The lid unscrews, a heat-ray flashes, and spectators are incinerated. More cylinders fall. The narrator sends his wife to safety in Leatherhead, then is swept up in a chaotic exodus as towering tripods stride out of the pit. The fighting machines, smooth and agile, wield heat-rays and later release a suffocating black smoke. At Weybridge and Shepperton, soldiers and civilians mount a futile defense; the narrator encounters an artilleryman whose grim clarity and survival instincts foreshadow later scenes.

Britain Overrun
The invasion outpaces comprehension. Telegraphs fail, railways clog, and London wavers between skepticism and panic before erupting in flight. The narrator’s brother, a medical student, witnesses the city’s unraveling and flees east with two women he aids on the road. Their escape culminates at the coast, where the ironclad Thunder Child charges the tripods to protect evacuating steamers. The warship’s sacrifice buys time for many to flee, but the Martians’ machines remain largely unscathed, advancing across a countryside stripped of order.

Life Under Siege
Back in Surrey, the narrator is trapped in a ruined house with a panicked curate as a new cylinder arrives. Through a crack they watch the Martians at work: pale, tentacled, with massive heads and pitiless efficiency. A handling-machine collects humans like livestock. The Martians feed on blood directly, a grotesque image of industrialized predation. Red weed from Mars spreads through streams, and black smoke drifts over fields, turning familiar landscapes alien. Starvation, fear, and religious mania boil over; the narrator restrains the curate and, after a harrowing stretch of silence, escapes.

Broken Plans
He meets the artilleryman again, now spinning a grand vision of underground resistance: tunnels, discipline, and long patience. The narrator briefly shares the dream before seeing, in the man’s idleness and self-importance, a microcosm of human frailty. Abandoning the fantasy, he wanders into a near-silent London draped with red weed and ash, expecting death.

Collapse and Aftermath
The tripods stand oddly still. He discovers the Martians dead in their machines. They have succumbed not to human courage or weapons, but to terrestrial microbes for which they had no immunity. The red weed withers. Church bells ring, survivors stagger from hiding, and tentative order begins to reassemble. The narrator is reunited with his wife, long feared lost, and reflects on the razor-thin margin on which civilization rests.

Themes and Significance
A tale of invasion becomes a mirror held to empire. Wells inverts colonial logic by making readers inhabit the terror of the colonized. Scientific progress appears as double-edged: dazzling intellect without empathy, and human complacency in the face of the unknown. Nature, indifferent but decisive, asserts supremacy through the smallest agents of life. The book’s documentary style, split viewpoints, and blend of plausible science with visionary terror laid the template for modern alien-invasion narratives while retaining a bracing sense of humility before forces beyond human control.