H. G. Wells 
The War of the Worlds (Illustrated) 

The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells first serialised in 1897 in the UK by Pearson’s Magazine and in the United States by Cosmopolitan magazine.

Written between 1895 and 1897, it is one of the earliest stories that detail a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of both an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and of his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians. The novel is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.

The narrative opens in an astronomical observatory at Ottershaw where explosions are seen on the surface of planet Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Later a ‘meteor’ lands on Horsell Common, near the unnamed narrator’s home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is an artificial cylinder that opens, disgorging Martians who are ‘big’ and ‘greyish’ with ‘oily brown skin’, ‘the size, perhaps, of a bear’, each with ‘two large dark-coloured eyes’, and lipless ‘V-shaped mouths’ which drip saliva and are surrounded by two ‘Gorgon groups of tentacles’. The narrator finds them ‘at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous’.

Herbert George ‘H. G.’ Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a ‘father of science fiction’, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.