Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was born in Bromley, Kent, the son of a shopkeeper and a lady's maid. After an apprenticeship to a draper he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley, and he taught and wrote science journalism before The Time Machine (1895) made his name. In a burst of 'scientific romances' over the next few years he published The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), written while he lived at Woking in Surrey. He later turned to social novels, popular history (The Outline of History, 1920) and political writing, and is counted among the founders of modern science fiction.
“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”
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
