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1/ The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells 'But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? . . . Are we or they
2Lords of the World? . . . And how are all things made for man?' KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy) Contents
3BOOK ONE.--THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS I. THE EVE OF THE WAR. II. THE FALLING STAR. III. ON HORSELL COMMON. IV. THE
4CYLINDER OPENS. V. THE HEAT-RAY. VI. THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD. VII. HOW I REACHED HOME. VIII. FRIDAY NIGHT. IX.
5THE FIGHTING BEGINS. X. IN THE STORM. XI. AT THE WINDOW. XII. WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.
6XIII. HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE. XIV. IN LONDON. XV. WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY. XVI. THE EXODUS FROM LONDON. XVII.
7THE "THUNDER CHILD". BOOK TWO.--THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS I. UNDER FOOT. II. WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE. III.
8THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT. IV. THE DEATH OF THE CURATE. V. THE STILLNESS. VI. THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS. VII. THE MAN ON
9PUTNEY HILL. VIII. DEAD LONDON. IX. WRECKAGE. X. THE EPILOGUE. BOOK ONE THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS I. THE EVE OF THE
10WAR. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and
11closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their
12various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
13scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and
14fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible
15that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of
16human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious
17to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men
18upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space,
19minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,
20regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth
21century came the great disillusionment. The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a
22mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by
23this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased
24to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume
25of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and
26all that is necessary for the support of animated existence. Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
27writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed
28there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our
29earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not
30only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end. The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet
31has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that
32even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more
33attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change
34huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of
35exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The
36immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And
37looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest
38distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation
39and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of
40broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas. And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth,
41must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already
42admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon
43Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they
44regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation
45after generation, creeps upon them. And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter
46destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its
47inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of
48extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if
49the Martians warred in the same spirit? The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety--their
50mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
51perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth
52century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been
53the star of war--but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time
54the Martians must have been getting ready. During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part
55of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard
56of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of
57the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet
58unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions. The storm burst upon us six years
59ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the
60amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the
61twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen,
62moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve.
63He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed
64out of a gun." A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers
65except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever
66threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known
67astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take
68a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.
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