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Title:
The War of the Worlds
Author: H.G. Wells
First Published in: 1898
War of the Worlds, The, a Science Fiction fantasy by H.
G. Wells, published 1898. 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 smpid 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 country before eventually falling
victims to terrestrial bacteria. A broadcast by Orson
Welles of a dramatization of the novel in the US on 30
Oct. 1938 caused a furore, many of its millions of
listeners taking it for a factual report of the invasion
by Martians of New Jersey.
Text file provided by:
Project Gutenberg
[148kB Zip file]