The War of the Worlds: The Original Unabridged and Complete Edition ( H. G. Wells Classics)

by H. G. Wells

Overview

The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians and is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon. The plot is similar to other works of invasion literature from the same period, and has been variously interpreted as a commentary on the theory of evolution, British colonialism, and Victorian-era fears, superstitions and prejudices. Wells later noted that inspiration for the plot was the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Some historians have argued that Wells wrote the book to encourage his readership to question the morality of imperialism. At the time of publication, it was classified as a scientific romance, like Wells's earlier novel, The Time Machine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781915932884
Publisher:	Global Publishers
Publication date:	11/30/2023
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	55,480
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was an English author, social critic, historian, futurist and biographer, but will always be known as one of the founding fathers of science fiction. His novels The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and others all offer powerful visions of the future that not only remain relevant but continue to be adapted to film and television well over a century after their initial appearance.

Date of Birth:

September 21, 1866

Date of Death:

August 13, 1946

Place of Birth:

Bromley, Kent, England

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Normal School of Science, London, England

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Eve of the War

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; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and longbefore this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from life's beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbor. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and gray with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety -- their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours -- and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet -- it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war -- but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.

The War of the Worlds. Copyright © by H. Wells. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
H.G.Wells: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The War of the Worlds

Appendix A: H.G. Wells on The War of the Worlds

1. H.G. Wells, from Strand Magazine (1920)
2. H.G. Wells, from “Preface to Volume III” (1924)

Appendix B: Wells’s Publications Related to The War of the Worlds

1. H.G. Wells, from “Zoological Retrogression” (1891)
2. H.G. Wells, “On Extinction” (1893)
3. H.G. Wells, from “The Advent of the Flying Man: An Inevitable Occurrence” (1893)
4. H.G. Wells, from “The Man of the Year Million” (1893)
5. H.G. Wells, from “Another Basis for Life” (1894)
6. H.G. Wells, “The Extinction of Man: Some Speculative Suggestions” (1894)
7. H.G. Wells, from “The Stolen Bacillus” (1894)
8. H.G. Wells, “Intelligence on Mars” (1896)
9. H.G. Wells, “Through a Microscope” (1897)

Appendix C: Extracts from Wells’s Correspondence

Appendix D: Reviews of The War of the Worlds

1. John St. Loe Strachey, from Spectator (29 January 1898)
2. Academy (29 January 1898)
3. R.A. Gregory, from Nature (10 February 1898)
4. Basil Williams, from Athenaeum (5 February 1898)

Appendix E: Influences on Wells

1. Winwood Reade, from The Martyrdom of Man (1872, 1875)
2. T.H. Huxley, from Evolution and Ethics (1893)
3. H.G.Wells, from “Huxley” (1901)

Appendix F: Invasion Narratives

1. William Le Queux, from The Great War in England in 1897 (1894)
2. “Grip” (pseudonym), from How John Bull Lost London (1882)

Appendix G: Mars in 1898

1. Nature (2 August 1894)
2. Percival Lowell, from Mars (1895)

Appendix H: Woking and Surrey

1. A.R. Hope Moncrieff, from Black’s Guide to Surrey (1898)
2. Eric Parker, from Highways and Byways in Surrey (1908)

Appendix I: The Victorian Military, 1890s

1. Field Artillery
2. Gunners of Field Artillery
3. High-Angle Firing
4. Machine Gun Detachment
5. Heliograph Operators
6. 1st Dragoons
7. H.M.S.Thunderer
8. H.M.S. Ramilles

Selected Bibliography

Reading Group Guide

1. In 1878 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli used the most advanced telescope of his day to map the surface of Mars. He discovered a number of dark, thin lines crisscrossing the planet and assumed that they were water channels'in Italian, canali. This was mistranslated into English as canals; as a result of this subtle linguistic error, many people in Britain and America believed these passages were man-made. It was in such an atmosphere of misunderstanding and scientific speculation that Wells published The War of the Worlds. Today, however, we know a great deal about Mars and the possibility of life there. Does our scientific knowledge of what is on Mars make the novel any less alarming? Why or why not?

2. Isaac Asimov has argued that The War of the Worlds can be read as an argument against British colonialism and the cold expansion of the empire. 'H. G. Wells must have wanted to write his book in such a way as to demonstrate the evils of [colonialism], ' Asimov writes. 'He must have tried to show his own countrymen what they were doing to the world. The British had been in the forefront of the imperialistic drive, and by the end of the 1800's, the British Empire included a quarter of the land area and the population of the world. . . . It seemed only poetic justice then that the Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds fell upon the British.' Do you agree with Asimov's reading?

3. Wells begins the book with the chilling image of alien life watching over the earth. He describes the Martians as planning their attacks on an unsuspecting man with 'intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.' How does this image resonate today?

4. Shortly beforeWells died in 1946, he said, 'Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me.' What does Wells mean by this?

5. When the Martians first land on earth, the people who encounter them initially treat the incident lightly, as if the aliens are a traveling amusement. Is this a realistic response? What do you think Wells is trying to say by this?

6. How does Wells use language and narrative style to create suspense and a sense of terror? Is the book frightening?

7. Many people consider The War of the Worlds the greatest science fiction book of all time. Do you agree? Why or why not? What other books are among the best? What defines a classic of science fiction?

Interviews

Contains approximately 61,000 words.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells's 1898 classic -- the first and still the definitive alien invasion story -- has been described by editor extraordinaire James Gunn as "not simply a novel but the beginning of a genre."

What is at first believed to be falling stars or harmless meteorites turns out to be cylindrical Martian ships filled with nightmarish, tentacled invaders and their robotic war machines. When curious Englanders come to inspect the massive containers imbedded in the still-smoking countryside, metallic appendages emerge from the pits to kill every living thing in their path with strange heat rays. Then as the surrounding townships slowly devolve into chaos, the Martians begin constructing giant tripod war machines to track down and kill -- or capture -- as many of the human "inferior animals" as possible. The nameless narrator, trapped in a house almost completely crushed by the impact of a starship, watches in horror as the seemingly unstoppable Martians build their mechanical armies, kill hundreds with poisonous gas -- and begin snacking on captured humans!

Wells has been called the father of modern science fiction for good reason. Landmark works like The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds are just as compelling and wildly entertaining today as they were more than a century ago. Fans and historians of the science fiction genre who have yet to read Wells's classic tale of Martian invasion should definitely add this title to their reading lists. Paul Goat Allen

bn.com

The creations of Mr. Wells . . . belong unreservedly to an age and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible.” —Jules Verne

From the Publisher

Christopher Hurt delivers the narrative of this early science fiction classic in a peculiar British accent--almost American-sounding except for certain words and dropped "r's"--but he provides the characters' dialogue with familiar British accents. He moves the story along (despite the frequent mention of minor geographical particulars--Wells's attempt at verisimilitude, no doubt--gumming things up) and renders clearly its scientific speculation and social satire, its moments of deep emotion, and its close observation of humanity, in both courage and folly. He conveys suspense but, unfortunately, fails at conveying the excitement of violent and dramatic action. Even so, a solid and accomplished telling still compels. W.M. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

FEB/MAR 06 - AudioFile