The War of the Worlds
Cylinders land on Horsell Common and something inside them begins to unscrew. Wells tells the story through an ordinary narrator who walks, hides and runs, and through his brother in London, so that the invasion is registered as a series of rumours and crowd panics rather than a battle.
The Martians are not evil; they are simply more advanced, and Wells uses that to reverse the imperial adventure stories of his own day. The famous ending is not a victory. It is an accident of biology, and the book's coldness about human importance is what has kept it alive.
Public-domain status
First published in 1898. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; H. G. Wells died in 1946, so this work has been free to republish there since 2017.
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Keep reading
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- London — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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