The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells, 1898

H. G. Wells’s novel of an invasion of England from Mars, told by a man in Woking, Surrey, who goes out to see the first of the Martians’ cylinders where it has fallen on Horsell Common.

Start reading27 chapters, about 60,000 words

Famous quotes

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter IIn context
- Intelligence
- Science
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter IIn context
- Envy
- Intelligence
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter VIIIn context
- Emotion
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers
Book Two: The Earth under the Martians, Chapter VIIIIn context
- Life & Death
- Nature

Book One: The Coming of the Martians

Chapter IThe Eve of the War
Chapter IIThe Falling Star
Chapter IIIOn Horsell Common
Chapter IVThe Cylinder Opens
Chapter VThe Heat-Ray
Chapter VIThe Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road
Chapter VIIHow I Reached Home
Chapter VIIIFriday Night
Chapter IXThe Fighting Begins
Chapter XIn the Storm
Chapter XIAt the Window
Chapter XIIWhat I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton
Chapter XIIIHow I Fell in with the Curate
Chapter XIVIn London
Chapter XVWhat Had Happened in Surrey
Chapter XVIThe Exodus from London
Chapter XVIIThe “Thunder Child”

Book Two: The Earth under the Martians

Chapter IUnder Foot
Chapter IIWhat We Saw from the Ruined House
Chapter IIIThe Days of Imprisonment
Chapter IVThe Death of the Curate
Chapter VThe Stillness
Chapter VIThe Work of Fifteen Days
Chapter VIIThe Man on Putney Hill
Chapter VIIIDead London
Chapter IXWreckage
Chapter XThe Epilogue

Famous quotes

Contents

Book One: The Coming of the Martians

Book Two: The Earth under the Martians