The War of the Worlds

by H.G. Wells

What makes such imaginings interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human.

In The War of the Worlds, humanity is not destroyed, but the reader’s complacency about the certainty of humankind’s survival is forever disrupted.

Man’s complacent assumption of the future is too confident. We think because things have been easy…for a generation or so, we are going on to perfect comfort and security in the future…. In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen…the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its compete overthrow.

The art of science fiction is not the overcoming of indifference but the establishment of new, unanticipated possibilities. A base of solid factuality fosters imaginative acceptance of what until now had never been conceived.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.

Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal.

“Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like ‘luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.”

“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” said the artilleryman.

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done?

“And the mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be.

“vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat.”

One was professing to have seen the Martians. “Boilers on stilts, I tell you, striding along like men.”

For a moment he lay astonished, wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad.

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight