Overview

The narrative opens in an astronomical observatory at Ottershaw where explosions are seen on the surface of planet Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Later a meteor lands on Horsell Common, near the unnamed narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is an artificial cylinder that opens, disgorging Martians who are big and greyish with oily brown skin, the size, perhaps, of a bear, each with two large dark-coloured eyes, and lipless V-shaped mouths which drip saliva and are surrounded by two Gorgon groups of tentacles. The narrator finds them at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. They briefly emerge, have difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere, and rapidly retreat into their cylinder. A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) approaches the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them and others nearby with a heat-ray before beginning to assemble their machinery. Military forces arrive that night to surround the common, including Maxim guns. The population of Woking and the surrounding villages are reassured by the presence of the military. A tense day begins, with much anticipation of military action by the narrator. The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells first serialised in 1897 in the UK by Pearson's Magazine and in the US by Cosmopolitan magazine. The novel's first appearance in hardcover was in 1898 from publisher William Heinemann of London. Written between 1895 and 1897, it is one of the earliest stories that detail a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race.

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