The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds Review

When H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, Britain sat at the height of its imperial power — confident, expansionist, and largely untroubled by the question of what the colonised felt. Wells asked that question by inverting the equation entirely. The Martians who crash into Woking and begin incinerating the English countryside are not monsters from a pulp nightmare; they are simply a more advanced civilisation doing to England what England had been doing to vast stretches of Africa and Asia.

That political inversion is the novel’s lasting achievement, but it would mean nothing if the book were not also terrifying. Wells’s prose strips away all heroism from the early chapters with merciless efficiency — there is no resistance, no rallying of British pluck, only panic, rout, and the grinding irrelevance of human military technology against the Martian heat-ray and the tripod war machines. The narrator, an unnamed writer, spends most of the novel simply running, watching, and trying to comprehend. The chapter in which he witnesses the destruction of a warship from a distance, the naval guns blazing uselessly, is one of the great set pieces in English fiction.

The famous resolution — bacteria, not bullets, defeat the Martians — has frustrated some readers, but it is exactly right thematically. The universe’s indifference to the dramatic human need for heroic victory is the point. Earth is not saved by courage or ingenuity; it is saved by the same blind microbial processes that govern all life, Martian and human alike.

Over a century on, The War of the Worlds still reads as a provocation.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The War of the Worlds apart: The colonial reversal at the heart of the novel is a brilliant and still-underappreciated political act; The pacing is relentless — Wells never lets the reader, or England, catch a breath; and The Martian technology feels genuinely alien rather than just human weapons scaled up. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The War of the Worlds give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Technological superiority does not confer moral superiority — the Martians are efficient, not righteous. Civilisation is far more fragile than its inhabitants believe in comfortable times. Empire requires dehumanising the colonised; Wells shows what that dehumanisation feels like from the inside. Nature — in the form of bacteria — operates on scales and timelines that dwarf human conflict. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Why It Endures

The War of the Worlds belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. H.G. Wells’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

The narrator’s unnamed wife is essentially a MacGuffin rather than a character. The resolution, while scientifically clever, arrives very abruptly after sustained tension. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Serialisation and Orson Welles

The War of the Worlds was serialised in Pearson’s Magazine from April to December 1897, and published as a book by Heinemann in January 1898. On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a radio adaptation of the novel in the form of news reports interrupting a music programme. The broadcast caused widespread panic among listeners who missed the opening announcement that it was a dramatisation — the extent of the panic was later exaggerated by newspaper coverage, but there were documented instances of listeners fleeing their homes. The broadcast made Welles internationally famous and remains the most significant single cultural event generated by the novel.

Film Adaptations

Two major film adaptations have been produced. Byron Haskin directed the 1953 version, updating the setting to contemporary California; the film received the Academy Award for Best Special Effects. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation, with Tom Cruise, updated the setting to New Jersey and New York and was released the year before the production of contemporary concerns about catastrophic civilian casualties. Wells’s original novel — set in Surrey and told in the first person by a narrator attempting to reach his wife — retains its power partly because the narrator is a passive observer rather than a protagonist: the Martians are indifferent to individual human beings in a way that produces a specific kind of horror.

The Orson Welles Broadcast

Orson Welles’s 1938 CBS radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, adapted as a realistic news bulletin, is reported to have caused panic among American listeners; the extent of the alarm has been revised by historians, who note the audience was relatively small and newspaper accounts of mass hysteria were exaggerated. The broadcast made Welles nationally famous at 23 and contributed to his move to Hollywood, where he made Citizen Kane (1941). Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film adaptation relocated the story to New Jersey and New York, starring Tom Cruise.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.7/5 — A masterpiece of speculative dread that remains as politically pointed as it was in 1898 — Wells forces his Victorian readers to imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a technologically superior civilisation.