The War of the Worlds
War of the Worlds, The,a science fiction fantasy by H. G. Wells , published 1898 , and written while he was living in Woking; it describes the arrival of the Martians in Woking, driven from their own planet by its progressive cooling to take refuge in a warmer world. In a letter Wells described his plan for the work, in which: ‘I completely wreck and sack Woking—killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways—then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity’; much of the novel's power depends on the contrast between the familiar stupid bourgeois complacent reactions of the humans and the terrifying destructive intelligence of the Martians, which consist of round bodies, each about 4 feet in diameter, each body containing a huge brain. They live by the injection into themselves of the fresh living blood of other creatures, mostly of human beings, and they devastate the...
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