The War of the Worlds

First serialised in 1897 and published as a book in 1898, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds imagines a terrifying invasion of Earth by technologically superior beings from Mars. When the Martians land in the English countryside, their heat-rays and towering fighting machines reduce familiar landscapes to scenes of panic and destruction, forcing ordinary people to confront the collapse of the civilisation they had taken for granted. Narrated by an unnamed writer struggling to survive, the novel follows the invasion through disrupted journeys, ruined towns and encounters that reveal both the vulnerability and the resilience of humanity.

Wells transforms the adventure story into a searching examination of imperial power, scientific progress and the precariousness of human supremacy. Writing at the height of the British Empire, he reverses the logic of colonial conquest, asking readers to imagine their own society subjected to the violence it has inflicted elsewhere. With its vivid atmosphere, unsettling realism and enduring vision of extraterrestrial contact, The War of the Worlds became a foundational work of modern science fiction, shaping how generations of writers and readers have imagined invasion from beyond our world.

From the book

“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.”

— H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

On The War of the Worlds

“The War of the Worlds is a classic of science fiction.”

— Encyclopaedia Britannica