The War of the Worlds

One night a series of flashes is seen on the planet Mars, and soon after a cylinder falls on the common at Horsell, near Woking. The narrator watches it unscrew, and from it come Martians who build huge three-legged fighting machines armed with a Heat-Ray and a poisonous Black Smoke. Within days they have crushed the army, spread their red weed across the land and driven the people of London into panic and flight. Hiding in a ruined house, the narrator waits for the end, until the invaders are struck down by something no one expected.

H. G. Wells published the novel in 1898, partly as a reversal of empire: the British, who had conquered peoples like the Tasmanians, now face the same fate. Orson Welles's radio adaptation of 1938 frightened many American listeners, and the book shaped almost every alien invasion story that followed. Wells's next look at another world is The First Men in the Moon.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.

He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.