I got this book from Free Booksey! I have heard so much about War of the Worlds and now I finally read it. It was a fantastic book, just think, it was written in 1898! H.G. Wells was at the beginning of the science fiction genre.
The story is told through a narrator who was first on the scene when the large tube landed on the town green. It took a day for the capsule to open, an when it did…. Astronomers had identified flashes of light coming from Mars, thought they were meteorites when they were approaching.
The Martians used heat rays, black clouds of gas and fighting machines to conquer small towns in England on their way to London! The English army didn’t know what to do. More tubes arrived and residents began to flee. Many lives, homes and businesses were destroyed.
The narrator was stranded in a collapsed home observing the Martians through a peephole to avoid detection. He described the Martian as a being who may have evolved from a Human like form, but was all brain and tentacles and lived off blood with no digestive organs that weren’t necessary. He met others who felt the World was ending, with no hope for the future. Some were planning how to survive as an inferior race to the conquerors!
In the end civilization is able to survive by the help of the smallest of organisms!
The book is a social commentary about the British empire, Europe and America and their imperialist colonization of the world and its treatment of indigenous peoples. You thought we were the first to find fault with past performances! The Martians give England a taste of their own treatment. Charles Darwin’s writing had an influence on the story too.
The book is well written, scary, thrilling and with plenty of human drama. The ending is suprising, but not really if you remember the consequences of European occupation.
It’s a great book, one of the classics you have to read. I rate it an A+.