The War of The Worlds

Author: H.G. Wells

I always appreciate a good book by Wells. This is the fourth I have read, after The Time Machine, The island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man.

I knew about this story, given its famous movie adaptation, but I hadn’t seen the movie, so I didn’t know much. I was pretty surprised how the book turned out honestly, and am not sure if that is how they depict it in the movie.

The plot is as follows. Mars sends a bunch of alien pods to earth. Humanity watches in awe as they make there way to earth. The pods land in the UK. At first, the pods are met with fascination from the humans who have seen it, and they don’t seem too alarmed. The pods begin to open up, and alien like creatures are coming out of them. However the pods left such a big crater, the aliens can’t seem to get out of them (likely due to their unpreparedness for earths gravity).

Before long though, things start going sideways. The aliens have brought war machines with them, which are these gigantic robotic tripods. They have heat rays that annihilate everything in their path, as well as a black substance they spray that is toxic and kills everything in its path. The aliens demolish several cities, including London. Humanity does their best to fight off these war machines, but only manages to destroy one, of the many of them.

Throughout the book, we are told the story by a narrator who lived to tell the tale, and had several close encounters with the aliens, including essentially being trapped in a pit with some of them. Just as the narrator is starting to lose hope and come to grips with the fact that the humans are essentially just ants to the martians, and they will be wiped out, or made slaves, something strange happens.

He hears a martian apparently shrieking in pain. As he approaches, he sees it dying of what appears to be some sickness or virus. The martians were not prepared for humanities diseases and viruses, caught them quickly, and did not have the antibodies to survive them. So we end the book with all the martians dying, and humanity being saved. Though the book does end suggesting that it is very possible the martians come back in the future.

I definitely did not expect the way humanity survived was that the martians all caught the black plague, or whatever sickness caused them to die. Though I suppose it is a realistic ending, rather than humanity somehow conquering the technologically advanced invaders with a barrage of musket fire or something.

One underlying theme in the book that I’ve seen mentioned several times is a critique of imperialism. Wells was critical of the UK for their colonization of much of the world. Many people don’t consider it a coincidence that London was nearly colonized by invaders in his book.