The War of the Worlds Summary: What Happens and Why It Lasts
What it is about
The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, written between 1895 and 1897, serialised in Pearson's Magazine in Britain and Cosmopolitan in the United States in 1897, and published in hardcover by William Heinemann in 1898. The premise is simple and brutal. Mars is an older, smaller world that has reached what Wells calls the "last stage of exhaustion". Its inhabitants, far more intelligent than humans and far better armed, decide to take Earth and remove the people on it.
The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator living in Surrey. What begins as a curiosity, an object thought to be a meteor landing on Horsell Common, turns out to be an artificial cylinder launched months earlier, timed for the moment Earth and Mars came into opposition. The Martians inside struggle with Earth's gravity and air. They are not remotely human: an enormously enlarged head and brain, two large eyes, a beak mouth, an octopus-like body and long whip-shaped tentacles. When a group of people approach the pit waving a white flag, the Martians kill them with a heat ray.
From there the book becomes a chronicle of retreat. The narrator watches the first three-legged fighting machine rise, armed with the heat ray and a chemical weapon that spreads toxic black smoke. Woking is destroyed. The army is wiped out around the cylinder. The narrative moves between glimpses of destruction, flight, and uneasy conversations with other survivors, which is where much of the book's power sits.
The main characters
The narrator is never named. He is an ordinary observant man, pushed from reasoned curiosity to terror to something close to despair. His account is the whole structure of the book.
His younger brother carries a separate strand of the story. He is in London as the panic begins, joins the mass exodus, reaches the coast and buys passage to Europe on a refugee ship. He witnesses one of the novel's most famous episodes, in which the torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child attacks three tripods and destroys all three before sinking from the damage, buying the evacuation fleet time to escape.
Two survivors shape the narrator's thinking. The artilleryman, whose battery was destroyed attacking the cylinder, appears early and again on Putney Hill, where he lays out grand plans for how humans might go on fighting once the Martians rule the world. The curate is the other, a man who collapses into despair and becomes a danger to them both when the pair are trapped under the ruins of a manor house. From that hiding place the narrator learns the worst detail of the book: the Martians feed on blood, now taken from humans, and seem to communicate by some form of telepathy.
The themes
Wells was explicit about his intent. In the preface to his collected works in 1933 he described his lifelong admiration for Jonathan Swift and a habit of making stories "reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions". The War of the Worlds, like The Time Machine, was "another assault on human self-satisfaction", written "consciously grim, under the influence of Swift's tradition".
The sharpest reading is the imperial one. Wells later said the inspiration for the plot was the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. The book turns Victorian England, at the height of its confidence, into the colonised territory. Superior technology arrives, negotiation is refused, and the local population is treated as material. Some historians argue Wells wrote the book precisely to make his readers question the morality of empire.
Underneath that sits evolution. The famous opening image describes minds "vast and cool and unsympathetic" regarding Earth with envious eyes, intellects as far above ours as ours are above the beasts. Power, in this book, is not moral. It is simply a stage of development, and it can be pointed at you.
Why it still matters
It is one of the earliest stories to put humanity in direct conflict with an alien race, and one of the most commented-on works in the whole science fiction canon. Nearly every invasion story since borrows its shape. Its cultural reach extended far beyond print: the 1938 radio broadcast directed and narrated by Orson Welles caused a sensation and convinced part of the listening public that a Martian landing was actually happening.
It suits readers who want ideas with their spectacle, anyone interested in Victorian anxiety, and readers who like disaster writing that stays at ground level rather than following generals and governments.
How it ends (spoilers)
The narrator escapes the ruined house and travels towards West London. Martian red weed has spread everywhere there is water, but he notices it is dying. After meeting the artilleryman again on Putney Hill, he walks into a deserted London and hears a strange howling from fighting machines that are no longer moving. Hopeless, he resolves to die and approaches a stationary machine on Primrose Hill, expecting to be killed. He finds the Martians dead. The invasion is not broken by armies or artillery but by Earth's own biology, the one defence no weapon could have planned for.
More: More H.G. Wells posters