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On the evening of 30 October 1938, listeners tuning in to CBS heard dance music interrupted by a string of urgent news bulletins. It was a play, an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles, and the legend of the mass panic it caused has outlived the facts: historians now think the newspapers blew it far out of proportion. Still, the story Welles borrowed had been unsettling readers for some forty years.
That story was H. G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds," first serialized in 1897 and published as a book in 1898. If you know it only through the radio play, the 1953 or 2005 films, or Jeff Wayne's 1978 album, the novel is worth meeting on its own terms. Here is what to expect from the opening chapters, with nothing given away beyond them.
The first few chapters
The narrator, who is never named, looks back on events he lived through. He begins with how wrapped up in its own affairs humanity was at the end of the nineteenth century, and how no one imagined it was being observed from Mars.
He lives in Maybury, near Woking in Surrey. One night he joins Ogilvy, an astronomer he knows, at the observatory in Ottershaw. Puzzling outbursts of gas have been seen on the planet, but Ogilvy waves away any notion that something might live there.
Not long afterwards, something like a falling star comes down near Woking. At dawn Ogilvy goes to look and finds it half-buried in the sand pits on Horsell Common. It is no meteorite. It is a huge, hollow, manufactured cylinder, and its lid is slowly turning, as if someone inside were unscrewing it.
Ogilvy hurries into Woking and tells a journalist, Henderson. By the time the narrator walks over, a crowd of curious neighbours has gathered around the pit, and he heads home for his tea. What is inside the cylinder is where I will stop.
What the novel gives you that the adaptations don't
A voice, not a broadcast. The radio play turned the story into breathless news flashes. The book is quieter: one ordinary man, writing down what he saw and what he was told afterwards, in order. That calm, documentary tone is precisely what makes the strange parts land.
Real ground underfoot. The 1938 broadcast moved the action to New Jersey for its American listeners. The novel stays rooted in Woking and the real places around it, which Wells knew from his own walks and bike rides. Reading with a map of the area open beside you is half the fun.
A slow start on purpose. The early chapters are full of tea, chatter, and onlookers. Wells takes his time letting one impossible object settle into an everyday Victorian suburb, and that patience is what gives the book its unease.
An idea that the spectacle can hide. Wells said later that part of his inspiration was what European colonisation had done to the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. Readers have long taken the novel as a critique of imperialism, one that turns the usual imperial point of view around. On the page, with time to think, that layer is hard to miss.
The real Woking, and the Mars of the 1890s
Wells (1866-1946) wrote the novel during what may have been the most creative period of his career. In May 1895 he and Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he married that October, moved to Woking and rented a house on Maybury Road, the same name as the narrator's neighbourhood, for just under eighteen months. He spent his mornings walking or cycling and his afternoons writing, and on those rides he scouted the places his story would use.
Mars, meanwhile, was a hot topic. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli had described lines on its surface as "canali," and in 1895 Percival Lowell's book "Mars" proposed that they might be channels built by intelligent beings. In August 1894 a French astronomer reported a strange light on the planet, and Wells opened his novel with that report. His readers were starting from something they might have seen in the papers.
Invasion stories existed before Wells, including Robert Potter's "The Germ Growers" and Kurd Lasswitz's "Two Planets." But this is the book usually credited as the foundational alien-invasion novel, and it did much to make "Martians" the stock name for hostile visitors from space.
Choosing an edition
Project Gutenberg offers the novel free as eBook #36, which is handy for a first taste or for checking whether the narrator's voice suits you. For a slower read, an edition with an introduction and notes is worth seeking out, since the book is packed with Surrey place names and late-Victorian details that a few notes can bring to life. If you like the history of science fiction, look out too for the 1927 reprint in Amazing Stories, with artwork by Frank R. Paul.
Who will enjoy it
Anyone who grew up on alien-invasion films and wants to see where the template came from. Readers who prefer slow-building dread to nonstop action. Fans of the radio play who have never read the book behind it. And anyone who enjoys fiction rooted in real places, the kind of novel that makes you want to visit the town afterwards.
Join the crowd at the edge of the sand pit, watch that lid turn, and decide how close you want to stand.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama)" (broadcast on 30 October 1938 on CBS as an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air; directed and narrated by Orson Welles; first part styled as news bulletins interrupting dance music, later part a conventional drama; research finding that newspapers greatly exaggerated the panic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
- Wikipedia, "The War of the Worlds" (serialized in Pearson's Magazine, April-December 1897, and in Cosmopolitan in the US in 1897; first book edition by William Heinemann in 1898; unnamed first-person narrator; setting in late-19th-century Surrey and London; Wells's move to Woking after marrying in 1895, his mornings walking or cycling and afternoons writing, and his scouting of locations on those rides; the "strange light" on Mars reported in August 1894 by a French astronomer, used to open the novel; Giovanni Schiaparelli calling linear features on Mars "canali" in 1877; Percival Lowell's 1895 book "Mars" suggesting irrigation channels built by a sentient species; Wells's later statement that the plot was partly inspired by the effect of European colonisation on Aboriginal Tasmanians; readings as a critique of imperialism; earlier invasion stories such as Robert Potter's "The Germ Growers" and Kurd Lasswitz's "Two Planets"; popularizing "Martians"; the 1938 radio version being set in New Jersey; the 1953 and 2005 films; Jeff Wayne's 1978 album; the 1927 reprint in Amazing Stories with artwork by Frank R. Paul) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
- Wikipedia, "H. G. Wells" (birth and death years; the move with Amy Catherine Robbins to a rented house on Maybury Road, Woking, in May 1895 for just under 18 months; their marriage in October 1895; planning and writing the novel in Woking, in what the article calls perhaps the most creative period of his career) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells
- Project Gutenberg, "The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells" (eBook #36; Book One, chapters 1-3: the narrator's retrospective opening about humanity not realizing it was watched from Mars; the narrator's home in Maybury; the astronomer Ogilvy and the observatory at Ottershaw; gas eruptions seen on Mars and Ogilvy's dismissal of Martian life; a meteor-like object falling near Woking; Ogilvy finding it at dawn in the sand pits of Horsell Common; the hollow, artificial cylinder with its lid slowly turning and unscrewing; Ogilvy running to Woking and telling the journalist Henderson; the gathering crowd; the narrator going home for tea) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm