The War of the Worlds

Summary

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. The narrator watches the planet through the telescope of his friend Ogilvy at Ottershaw. Some days later a falling star lands on Horsell Common, and it proves to be a huge metal cylinder. Crowds gather; the top unscrews, and grey tentacled creatures with great eyes and V-shaped mouths heave themselves out. When a deputation approaches under a white flag, the Martians burn it with an invisible Heat-Ray, killing Ogilvy, the astronomer Stent and many onlookers. More cylinders fall. The Martians assemble towering three-legged fighting-machines and advance over Surrey. The narrator drives his wife to her cousins at Leatherhead in a borrowed dog-cart, returns the cart through a thunderstorm, and sees the tripods wade through the night. A fleeing artilleryman joins him for a time. At Shepperton and Weybridge he watches the artillery bring down one machine, then escapes into the Thames as the Heat-Ray boils the river, and falls in with a curate whose faith has collapsed into terror. Meanwhile his younger brother in London sees the city panic under the Martians' poisonous black smoke and joins the exodus to the Essex coast, where the ironclad Thunder Child rams two fighting-machines while the steamers escape. In Book Two, The Earth Under the Martians, a fifth cylinder lands beside the house at Sheen where the narrator and the curate are hiding. Trapped for some fifteen days, he watches through a slit as the Martians feed by injecting the blood of living men into their own veins and build handling-machines in the pit. The curate grows wild and loud, and the narrator strikes him down; a Martian tentacle drags the curate's body away. Emerging into a landscape choked with the Martians' red weed, he meets the artilleryman again on Putney Hill, who dreams of an underground human remnant, but leaves him as a talker rather than a doer. In a silent London he hears a Martian howling 'Ulla, ulla' and finds the invaders dead on Primrose Hill, killed by earthly bacteria against which they had no defence. After a breakdown he returns to Woking and is reunited with his wife. An epilogue reflects on what the invasion has taught. The novel was serialized in Pearson's Magazine in 1897 and published as a book by Heinemann in 1898. It is a founding work of the alien-invasion story and has been widely adapted, including Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast.

Top Lessons

• Complacency before the unknown

  The first chapter describes men going about their little affairs, sure of their mastery of matter, while they are studied like creatures in a drop of water. Wells uses the invasion to puncture that assurance. The epilogue concludes that the earth can no longer be regarded as a fenced and secure dwelling place.

• Two ways of breaking down

  The curate and the artilleryman respond to catastrophe in opposite ways. The curate collapses into lament and blame, asking what sins Weybridge has done; the artilleryman makes bold plans for a new human order underground but does almost nothing. The narrator, frightened and sometimes harsh, keeps observing and acting, and the book asks the reader to judge all three.

• Humility before the smallest things

  Every human weapon fails; the Martians are killed by bacteria. The narrator describes them as slain by the humblest things God has put upon the earth, and adds that by the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright. Wells joins the language of providence to the language of natural selection and leaves readers to weigh how the two fit together.

• The fragile order of a city

  The brother's chapters show London's institutions failing within a day: the newspapers, the railway, the police. Crowds trample one another on the roads north, and robbers attack travellers, while some people show courage and kindness. The novel looks soberly at how a society behaves when ordinary supports give way.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel's ending depends on the germ theory of disease and on Darwinian ideas of acquired resistance: the Martians, from a planet without bacteria, have no defence against the putrefactive and disease germs to which terrestrial life has adapted over ages. Wells was writing about twenty years after the work of Pasteur and Koch made bacteria the accepted cause of infectious disease, and the narrator's phrasing joins natural selection to the older language of providence. Book Two, Chapter II gives a mock-anatomical account of the Martians, which the narrator says dissection later confirmed: bodies reduced to great brains, no digestive organs, nourishment by direct injection of blood taken from living creatures, no sleep, and reproduction by budding; the narrator links this to speculation that human beings too might evolve toward brain and hand. He also notes that Mars knows none of the fevers and contagions of human life. The psychological material is substantial. The curate, fleeing Weybridge, is described as driven to the verge of his reason and later raves in apocalyptic language. The narrator himself, after days of hiding and hunger, loses three days of memory after Primrose Hill and is found wandering and singing, then cared for by strangers; in the epilogue he describes waking at night haunted by images of the dead. Modern readers sometimes describe these passages in terms of acute stress reaction or dissociative amnesia; that is an interpretive reading, not Wells's vocabulary.

• Book Two, Chapter II (What We Saw from the Ruined House)

  The narrator's account of Martian anatomy: a body that is mostly brain, no digestion, feeding by injecting living blood, absence of sleep and fatigue, and the absence of bacteria and disease on Mars.

• Book One, Chapter XIII (How I Fell In with the Curate)

  The curate, sitting by the Thames, asks why such things are permitted and breaks into apocalyptic cries; the narrator judges that the disaster has driven him to the edge of his reason.

• Book Two, Chapters III-IV (The Days of Imprisonment; The Death of the Curate)

  Hunger and thirst in the ruined house at Sheen, the curate's drinking and loud raving, and the narrator's struggle to keep his own self-command.

• Book Two, Chapter VIII (Dead London)

  The Martians found dead of putrefactive and disease bacteria, with the narrator's explanation of human resistance acquired through natural selection.

• Book Two, Chapter IX (Wreckage) and Chapter X (The Epilogue)

  Three days the narrator cannot remember, his wandering through St. John's Wood, care by kindly strangers, and his later night visions of the dead.