By H. G. Wells
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| This cover really describes the book. |
Long time no see. This is my first time reading this author and I really liked it way more than the movie. If some of you saw the movie you'll notice many differences. The first being that they didn't have cars, they were English, and the nameless main character wasn't a divorced man who got himself two kids with him when Martians decided to attack.
Our main protagonist is a kidless philosophy writer who lives in Woking, a small town. He narrates us the recent invasion by Martians after mankind has managed to survive. He starts his story at the moment that one of his friends, an astronomer, shows him an unusual event happening in Mars through a telescope. Something like a shooting star coming from the red planet that scientists soon assumed was due to some volcanic eruption. Then he gazes without knowing the deadly truth coming towards Earth in awe.
Not long after, this green shooting star falls very near Woking and the first person to find it is none other than the astronomer, who finds buried deep within the ground a boiling cylinder of odd material. The news spread and people, old and young, go to see the strange artifact. The astronomer forms a group ready to receive the Martians and keep away the onlookers while the cylinder starts rotating and making odd noises from inside.
Our protagonist goes to see, curious as everyone else, and meets his friend. It is then while people dressed in their Sunday clothes, selling merchants and running kids playing around that it opens. From inside a strange device emerges and fires at people utterly burning them to corpses. Chaos soon wreaks havoc. People run towards the wood in terror. The astronomer and his group while handling a white flag are burned to the ground. While gazing from the woods, a strange thing struggles in the ground. A Martian. A slimy two-eyed Martian with a beak-like mouth and four tentacles in each side appear over the mound.
Everybody who survived return to their homes shrunk in terror. Soon the news spread but peacefulness remains. The Martians couldn't leave the mound. The gravity of this planet is too much for them. They can't stand up and are slow. People have faith in the army which has stationed near the area. He dines and tries to continue his life. But he couldn't have known in that moment, that while he believed they were powerless, the excess oxygen found in Earth's atmosphere was enough to drug them as to continue working nonstop in that little mound, inside that cylinder...
Soon, the army comes into contact with the Martians. The protagonist can hear them firing at them. Outside a police officer goes by horse shouting to take the valuable belongings and flee. The Martians managed to construct some odd machine and is approaching. Thinking fast he rents a carriage and a horse to an unsuspecting neighbor. He escapes with his wife to his cousin's house at the next town. From far away, red pillars of fire appear over his own.
When they finally arrive, he explains his situation to his cousin who lets them stay. Yet the protagonist feels compromised to fulfill his promise with his neighbor: to return his horse and carriage at evening. Against his better judgement he goes back at night. The roads are dark but silent. It is then that a Martian appears over a giant and strange machine. A tripod with a cone head and multiple tentacles of an unknown metal that swings as if walking. He urges the horse and tries to escape. The carriage is knocked over and the horse breaks its neck. He drags himself through the ground and hides in the woods. He continues his journey to his town and finds his neighbor dead on the road.
He flees back to his home finding it still fine, whereas some other areas of the town are utterly destroyed. There he gazes through the window and sees the Martians and their machines from afar thinking if maybe this strange devices are such to him as railroads and trains are to less intelligent animals. Soon he sees a man hiding along the house. He calls him over and lets him in. This man is a gunner who was in the battle and had fallen to the ground when the army was beaten almost instantly, he had pretended to be dead and finally came over to the town evading the tripods. They prepare supplies and decide it is no longer safe to go through where the protagonist has come from. Trains were disabled by the Martians and so they decide to travel through the woods along the roads.
They arrive to a town where the gunner rejoins the army and our protagonist finds himself alone again while the army prepares people to flee from town. The townspeople go along their Sunday clothes without a care in the world, too blind and confident of the defeat of the unseen Martians. Soon the attack comes and people flee to the river where giants masses of people wait for the ferries to get them to the other side.
The protagonist dives into the river and he rises from over it as people fall off the ferries like thunder. Two more tripods come along the river with their own Heat Rays and trying to burn the humans, evaporate big portions of water form the river. He swims desperately away from them while corpses start rising and tripoids catch with their tentacles the running people and smash them against the trees.
Soon a cannon fires at an unsuspecting Martian tripoid and destroys the cabin making it spin uncontrollably along the river while dangling its feet like crazy. It falls over along with his Heat Ray, still dangling its feet as a headless insect. A brownish liquid emanates from the cabin and the Heat Ray evaporates and heats the water in the river to its boiling point. The other two tripoids rapidly hurry to its fallen comrade and rescue its friend leaving the river.
The protagonist lets himself be driven by the river managing to escape the boiling water and reaches another town and between that destroyed town finds a priest.
The story continues along the point of view of the protagonist's brother. He studies medicine and lives in London where he narrates the skepticism and disregard for the Martian attack. He explains it to be due the dramatic and exaggerated accounts by the newspapers. He can't help worry for his brother as the army has places itself along London planning a counterattack. London seems safe and protected even though every day the train stations are full of refugees who had managed to escape with accounts of the attacks.
He goes to sleep forgetting once again, as everybody that Martians exist and are very near by. He goes to bed thinking what his day is going to be like tomorrow. He is awaken at two in the morning, some screams to evacuate the city or hide in their basements. The Martians are here. He gazes through his window as everybody else, hundreds of lights and windows light and open up to see in the dark night. Faraway shots and screams start to arise. The brother dresses up and hurries outside, someone explains to him that the Martians had come up with a new weapon: the Black Smoke. They just tossed a missile and the smoke soon asphyxiated all the troops hiding to ambush them. It kills if you touch it or inhale it. London is done for.
The brother flees along the rest of the people to the south and in the roads he helps two women when some men try to take by force there carriage. He travels with them from town to town, amazed at sight of havoc caused by the Martians. Humans flee through the road when people from town scream about incoming Martians. Carriages crash, people run over each other and the river of people smash against frantically. They manage to flee south and take an army boat. When leaving tripoids suddenly appear along the woods. The other boats go to their rescue and attack the tripoid so the passenger boat may reach the open sea. Along them a boat called Thunder Child crashes over a tripoid and takes it down with him before being defeated by the other two Martians. From afar the passengers cheer in victory at the only battle they have ever won in this war.
Once again our protagonist sits under a big tree near a destroyed town where a priest mumbles about the destruction of his church and the start of the apocalypse. The protagonist can see this priest is utterly mad and staying in this town is not smart so he decides to continue his journey to London. The priest follows behind him and they arrive to the next town where they manage to enter a house and find food in the cabinet. One day suddenly the house collapses and the protagonist loses consciousness, when he wakes up the priest instructs him to be still. There's glass all over the floor and a strange sound comes from outside. In dismay, the protagonist discovers that a cylinder has landed just next door and its crash had collapsed the house. The only exit is going at a visible range near the cylinder which is already guarded by Martian tripoids.
Both of them stay still in the house hoping for the Martians to open the cylinder and go. The protagonist and the priest have many discussions over the food and water over the days. They gaze in wonder over the slimy and odd Martians operating their strange machines and discover many incredible things about them. Yet the most unpleasant they found about which made the priest flee from the gap in the wall, was their way of feeding. They where eating the blood of humans and they could see first-hand the death of a fellow human at the hand of the hungry Martians.
Their fight became constant and more aggressive. One day the priest started screaming, to stop him he hit the priest and knocked him out cold. Yet he heard a sound from outside, the gap suddenly went darker as a Martian eye tried to gaze inside. The protagonist fled to the coal basement and closed the door. He stood in the dark silently and waiting, he could hear a tentacle from his machines going around the kitchen. Touching the walls and suddenly he heard him drag something heavy: the priest. He cowered in the small room and hoped that it would go away yet the tentacle started dragging through the wall and door. Struggling, he managed to learn how to open it! The tentacle went through the door and he event felt him touching his boot, but when he thought it was the end it suddenly grabbed a piece of coal and went away.
Incapable of trusting his good luck he stood there more time and finally decided to leave. He found the kitchen vandalized, the Martian had left the food cabinet empty. He found himself cornered like a rat with a cat waiting outside.
He went around fourteen days hiding in the house, but in the end finally he woke up and found the Martians where gone. He went outside and found the mound empty and only occupied by a red Martian plant that spread all around the houses and the mound. The idea struck him, he felt like a rabbit returning to his home only to find someone else building a house. He realized the the dominance and age of humans had ended. Like some of the wild dogs around, he started scavenging for food. He continued along the river when he managed to find some cookies. The river was infested with the crimson alien plants who had transformed the area near the rivers into a red valley. He decided to continue its path to London.
In the way he found a man hiding int he grass aiming at him with a gun. He announced him this area along with the town was his own as their wasn't enough food for both. The protagonist tried to explain to him that he was heading to London, he thought he may find his wife in there. How he had coming all over from Woking. The dirty man stood up and gladly came up to him. He was the gunner he had met long ago.
The gunner and the protagonist have a meaningful talk. The gunner explains to him his ideas. How he thinks that the Martians will eventually stop hunting humans and instead start to harvest them. Then there will become a time when people forget how it was before Martians arrives, all in their cages eating and inventing theories and religions to explain their lives under the authority of Martians.
The people who know the truth, the people who are free, will become such as rats. The gunner tells him his plan to counterattack Martians. It will take a long time but it will help to renew human people just like natural selection. He says to him he thinks that they may hide in the London sewers where the Martians can't get them. He wants to reconstruct a society full of people who are useful. The scientist and engineers will read the books they get them and learn how to control the tripoids. He describes vividly how one day they will kill the Martians with their own tripoid and reinstate the dominance of humans.
The protagonist explains that thirsty of hope he couldn't help but believe the crazy ideas of the gunner, it is when the gunner shows him the tunnel he's been trying to make connect with the town's sewers and finds how little he has done that decides to move on.
He heads to London which finds incredibly quiet. Dogs ran all over the city disputing the pieces of rotten meat they may find. A loud and repeating noise keeps echoing around the city from one of the still Martians tripoids. He finds corpses and stinking smells coming from the basements. He walks around and finds how the Martians have started building a camp in a crater they left in London, surely preparing the ground for the future colonization.
It is the next morning when the shrieking siren from one of the tripoids ceases, he can't help but wonder. He runs towards the still Martians in the park, petrified while standing, dead. And the last moments of the surviving shrieking Martian that suddenly became mute. He ran to the mound without fear of being seen by them and saw the birds taking chunks of slimy meat from inside the tripoids.
It was not then but later that he would understand that humanity had made himself a place in Earth after many years of deaths by illnesses caused by the tiny inhabitants of this planet. Deaths that had not been in vain and would guarantee the survival of humanity in future Martians attempts against them. For the superior Martians had doomed themselves the moment they had breathed the air, eaten the food and drank its water. The same way the red alien plants turned white and died by disease, so did the Martians atop their tripoids died without understanding how or why. He gazed at the destroyed city, the sunrise atop the great city and its light shining once more over London. Humanity was saved!
When he came to his senses he found himself taken care by a kind family. They had found him delirious in the streets. People had already started flocking once again to London once the news had spread the day he arrived to London. Some people had discovered it first and had started calling people back. He stood with them for a week but against their advice he decided to come back to his cousin's town and try to find his wife.
When he arrives he hears the dreary news. The town was destroyed by one of the tripoids who arrived days later. No one had survived. It came out of nowhere, out of curiosity, just like a child destroying an anthill just because. He decides to return home hoping that maybe they are there.
He arrives and enters. He finds it just the way he and the gunner had left it. He goes to the kitchen and stays there feeling down. In that moment he hears a woman outside asking a person if someone came. The protagonist rushes to the door where he finds his cousin and his wife dressed just as dirty as him.
After the war, many scientist studied the the remains of the Martians and their machinery. He doesn't think the Martians won't attack again but now humanity is prepared and they have lost the surprise factor. Maybe after their defeat they have lost interest in Earth. Some nights ago, he could swear he saw those green shooting stars heading to Venus and hopes that will be the end of their travels.
Everybody who survived return to their homes shrunk in terror. Soon the news spread but peacefulness remains. The Martians couldn't leave the mound. The gravity of this planet is too much for them. They can't stand up and are slow. People have faith in the army which has stationed near the area. He dines and tries to continue his life. But he couldn't have known in that moment, that while he believed they were powerless, the excess oxygen found in Earth's atmosphere was enough to drug them as to continue working nonstop in that little mound, inside that cylinder...
Soon, the army comes into contact with the Martians. The protagonist can hear them firing at them. Outside a police officer goes by horse shouting to take the valuable belongings and flee. The Martians managed to construct some odd machine and is approaching. Thinking fast he rents a carriage and a horse to an unsuspecting neighbor. He escapes with his wife to his cousin's house at the next town. From far away, red pillars of fire appear over his own.
When they finally arrive, he explains his situation to his cousin who lets them stay. Yet the protagonist feels compromised to fulfill his promise with his neighbor: to return his horse and carriage at evening. Against his better judgement he goes back at night. The roads are dark but silent. It is then that a Martian appears over a giant and strange machine. A tripod with a cone head and multiple tentacles of an unknown metal that swings as if walking. He urges the horse and tries to escape. The carriage is knocked over and the horse breaks its neck. He drags himself through the ground and hides in the woods. He continues his journey to his town and finds his neighbor dead on the road.
He flees back to his home finding it still fine, whereas some other areas of the town are utterly destroyed. There he gazes through the window and sees the Martians and their machines from afar thinking if maybe this strange devices are such to him as railroads and trains are to less intelligent animals. Soon he sees a man hiding along the house. He calls him over and lets him in. This man is a gunner who was in the battle and had fallen to the ground when the army was beaten almost instantly, he had pretended to be dead and finally came over to the town evading the tripods. They prepare supplies and decide it is no longer safe to go through where the protagonist has come from. Trains were disabled by the Martians and so they decide to travel through the woods along the roads.
They arrive to a town where the gunner rejoins the army and our protagonist finds himself alone again while the army prepares people to flee from town. The townspeople go along their Sunday clothes without a care in the world, too blind and confident of the defeat of the unseen Martians. Soon the attack comes and people flee to the river where giants masses of people wait for the ferries to get them to the other side.
The protagonist dives into the river and he rises from over it as people fall off the ferries like thunder. Two more tripods come along the river with their own Heat Rays and trying to burn the humans, evaporate big portions of water form the river. He swims desperately away from them while corpses start rising and tripoids catch with their tentacles the running people and smash them against the trees.
Soon a cannon fires at an unsuspecting Martian tripoid and destroys the cabin making it spin uncontrollably along the river while dangling its feet like crazy. It falls over along with his Heat Ray, still dangling its feet as a headless insect. A brownish liquid emanates from the cabin and the Heat Ray evaporates and heats the water in the river to its boiling point. The other two tripoids rapidly hurry to its fallen comrade and rescue its friend leaving the river.
The protagonist lets himself be driven by the river managing to escape the boiling water and reaches another town and between that destroyed town finds a priest.
The story continues along the point of view of the protagonist's brother. He studies medicine and lives in London where he narrates the skepticism and disregard for the Martian attack. He explains it to be due the dramatic and exaggerated accounts by the newspapers. He can't help worry for his brother as the army has places itself along London planning a counterattack. London seems safe and protected even though every day the train stations are full of refugees who had managed to escape with accounts of the attacks.
He goes to sleep forgetting once again, as everybody that Martians exist and are very near by. He goes to bed thinking what his day is going to be like tomorrow. He is awaken at two in the morning, some screams to evacuate the city or hide in their basements. The Martians are here. He gazes through his window as everybody else, hundreds of lights and windows light and open up to see in the dark night. Faraway shots and screams start to arise. The brother dresses up and hurries outside, someone explains to him that the Martians had come up with a new weapon: the Black Smoke. They just tossed a missile and the smoke soon asphyxiated all the troops hiding to ambush them. It kills if you touch it or inhale it. London is done for.
The brother flees along the rest of the people to the south and in the roads he helps two women when some men try to take by force there carriage. He travels with them from town to town, amazed at sight of havoc caused by the Martians. Humans flee through the road when people from town scream about incoming Martians. Carriages crash, people run over each other and the river of people smash against frantically. They manage to flee south and take an army boat. When leaving tripoids suddenly appear along the woods. The other boats go to their rescue and attack the tripoid so the passenger boat may reach the open sea. Along them a boat called Thunder Child crashes over a tripoid and takes it down with him before being defeated by the other two Martians. From afar the passengers cheer in victory at the only battle they have ever won in this war.
Once again our protagonist sits under a big tree near a destroyed town where a priest mumbles about the destruction of his church and the start of the apocalypse. The protagonist can see this priest is utterly mad and staying in this town is not smart so he decides to continue his journey to London. The priest follows behind him and they arrive to the next town where they manage to enter a house and find food in the cabinet. One day suddenly the house collapses and the protagonist loses consciousness, when he wakes up the priest instructs him to be still. There's glass all over the floor and a strange sound comes from outside. In dismay, the protagonist discovers that a cylinder has landed just next door and its crash had collapsed the house. The only exit is going at a visible range near the cylinder which is already guarded by Martian tripoids.
Both of them stay still in the house hoping for the Martians to open the cylinder and go. The protagonist and the priest have many discussions over the food and water over the days. They gaze in wonder over the slimy and odd Martians operating their strange machines and discover many incredible things about them. Yet the most unpleasant they found about which made the priest flee from the gap in the wall, was their way of feeding. They where eating the blood of humans and they could see first-hand the death of a fellow human at the hand of the hungry Martians.
Incapable of trusting his good luck he stood there more time and finally decided to leave. He found the kitchen vandalized, the Martian had left the food cabinet empty. He found himself cornered like a rat with a cat waiting outside.
He went around fourteen days hiding in the house, but in the end finally he woke up and found the Martians where gone. He went outside and found the mound empty and only occupied by a red Martian plant that spread all around the houses and the mound. The idea struck him, he felt like a rabbit returning to his home only to find someone else building a house. He realized the the dominance and age of humans had ended. Like some of the wild dogs around, he started scavenging for food. He continued along the river when he managed to find some cookies. The river was infested with the crimson alien plants who had transformed the area near the rivers into a red valley. He decided to continue its path to London.
In the way he found a man hiding int he grass aiming at him with a gun. He announced him this area along with the town was his own as their wasn't enough food for both. The protagonist tried to explain to him that he was heading to London, he thought he may find his wife in there. How he had coming all over from Woking. The dirty man stood up and gladly came up to him. He was the gunner he had met long ago.
The gunner and the protagonist have a meaningful talk. The gunner explains to him his ideas. How he thinks that the Martians will eventually stop hunting humans and instead start to harvest them. Then there will become a time when people forget how it was before Martians arrives, all in their cages eating and inventing theories and religions to explain their lives under the authority of Martians.
The people who know the truth, the people who are free, will become such as rats. The gunner tells him his plan to counterattack Martians. It will take a long time but it will help to renew human people just like natural selection. He says to him he thinks that they may hide in the London sewers where the Martians can't get them. He wants to reconstruct a society full of people who are useful. The scientist and engineers will read the books they get them and learn how to control the tripoids. He describes vividly how one day they will kill the Martians with their own tripoid and reinstate the dominance of humans.
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| Prototype uniform |
He heads to London which finds incredibly quiet. Dogs ran all over the city disputing the pieces of rotten meat they may find. A loud and repeating noise keeps echoing around the city from one of the still Martians tripoids. He finds corpses and stinking smells coming from the basements. He walks around and finds how the Martians have started building a camp in a crater they left in London, surely preparing the ground for the future colonization.
It is the next morning when the shrieking siren from one of the tripoids ceases, he can't help but wonder. He runs towards the still Martians in the park, petrified while standing, dead. And the last moments of the surviving shrieking Martian that suddenly became mute. He ran to the mound without fear of being seen by them and saw the birds taking chunks of slimy meat from inside the tripoids.
It was not then but later that he would understand that humanity had made himself a place in Earth after many years of deaths by illnesses caused by the tiny inhabitants of this planet. Deaths that had not been in vain and would guarantee the survival of humanity in future Martians attempts against them. For the superior Martians had doomed themselves the moment they had breathed the air, eaten the food and drank its water. The same way the red alien plants turned white and died by disease, so did the Martians atop their tripoids died without understanding how or why. He gazed at the destroyed city, the sunrise atop the great city and its light shining once more over London. Humanity was saved!
When he came to his senses he found himself taken care by a kind family. They had found him delirious in the streets. People had already started flocking once again to London once the news had spread the day he arrived to London. Some people had discovered it first and had started calling people back. He stood with them for a week but against their advice he decided to come back to his cousin's town and try to find his wife.
When he arrives he hears the dreary news. The town was destroyed by one of the tripoids who arrived days later. No one had survived. It came out of nowhere, out of curiosity, just like a child destroying an anthill just because. He decides to return home hoping that maybe they are there.
He arrives and enters. He finds it just the way he and the gunner had left it. He goes to the kitchen and stays there feeling down. In that moment he hears a woman outside asking a person if someone came. The protagonist rushes to the door where he finds his cousin and his wife dressed just as dirty as him.
After the war, many scientist studied the the remains of the Martians and their machinery. He doesn't think the Martians won't attack again but now humanity is prepared and they have lost the surprise factor. Maybe after their defeat they have lost interest in Earth. Some nights ago, he could swear he saw those green shooting stars heading to Venus and hopes that will be the end of their travels.
