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The War of the Worlds
by H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells [1898]
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the
World? . . . And how are all things made for man?-- KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of
Melancholy)
BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
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
scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
scrutinise 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 long before 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
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