The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 June 1999
by H. G. Wells
Many of us only know this story from the spectacular 1953 movie of the same name. (Or its remake. Or of Independence Day, which sported the same plot.) In 1938, Orson Welles caused a panic by broadcasting the story on a Halloween night radio broadcast. This is the original novel by a master of classic science fiction. The book presents one of the first (if not the first) stories of the invasion of Earth from menacing aliens from Mars. Here, giant cylinders fall to Earth from a massive cannon fired on Mars (not unlike Verne's mechanism to get from Earth to the Moon). They land across the English countryside to disgorge towering walking machines that march across the landscape to London spreading death and destruction wherever they go. The human defenses in the late 19th century are utterly overwhelmed by the mysterious heat weapons of the Martians. The story is quite frightening, and Wells convincingly tells the story from the point of view of individuals beneath a terrible and mysterious onslaught. It looks grim for humans, trodden under the Martian feet like ants beneath ours. Our future is the future of cattle. The attack is much more localized than the global horrors of later stories, centered around London only. But the vision of the unknown terror is very well presented. Read this book on a dark and lonely night.
Also by H. G. Wells: [The First Men in the Moon] [The Time Machine]
[Other Science-Fiction Reviews]