The War of the Worlds is split into two parts, Book one: The Coming of the Martians, and Book two: The Earth under the Martians. The novel is narrated by a writer of philosophical articles who throughout the narrative struggles to reunite with his wife, while witnessing the Martians rampaging through the southern English counties. Part one also features the tale of his brother, who accompanies two women to the coast in the hope of escaping England as it is invaded.
The plot has been related to invasion literature of the time. The novel has been variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British imperialism, and generally Victorian fears and prejudices. At the time of publication it was classified as a scientific romance, like his earlier novel The Time Machine. Since then, it has influenced much literature and other media, spawning half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, various comic book adaptations, a television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It also influenced the real-life work of scientists, notably the rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard.
The narrator (who is never named) is at an observatory in Ottershaw when explosions are seen on Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Later a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, southwest of London, near the narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is a space-going artificial cylinder. When the cylinder opens, the Martians (bulky, octopus-like creatures the size of a bear) briefly emerge, show difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere, and rapidly retreat into the cylinder, although a man who falls into the pit is apparently pulled in. A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) moves towards the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them with a heat-ray weapon, before beginning to assemble alien machinery.
After the attack, the narrator takes his wife to Leatherhead to stay with relatives until the threat is eliminated. The army has meanwhile set up guns, although the firing stops later. Upon returning home, he discovers the Martians have assembled towering three-legged "fighting-machines" (Tripods), each armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the so-called "black smoke". These Tripods easily defeat army units positioned around the crater and proceed to attack surrounding communities. Fleeing the scene, the narrator meets a retreating artilleryman, who tells him that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, cutting the narrator off from his wife. The two men try to escape together via Byfleet, but are separated at the Shepperton to Weybridge Ferry during a Martian attack on Shepperton. One of the Martian fighting machines is brought down in the River Thames by British artillery, causing its hot heat-ray equipment to almost boil the water as the narrator and countless others try to cross the river into Middlesex, while the Martians escape.
More cylinders land across southern England, and a panicked flight out of London begins, including the narrator's brother who flees to the Essex coast after Black Smoke is used to devastate London. The torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child destroys two tripods before being sunk by the Martians, though this allows the ship carrying the narrator's brother and his two female travelling companions to escape to continental Europe. Shortly after, all organised resistance has ceased, and the Tripods roam the shattered landscape unhindered. Red weed, a fast growing Martian form of vegetation, spreads over the landscape, aggressively overcoming the Earth's ecology, in much the same way as the Martians have overcome human civilisation.
The narrator takes refuge in a ruined building in Sheen shortly before a Martian cylinder lands nearby, trapping him with a mentally unstable curate he had originally met near Shepperton. The curate has been traumatised by the invasion and believes the Martians to be satanic creatures heralding the advent of Armageddon. For the next several days, the narrator desperately tries to calm the clergyman, and avoid attracting attention from the patrolling Tripods, while witnessing the Martians' daily routine, which includes feeding on humans by direct blood transfusion and using a handling machine, which acts like a living creature. The curate's evangelical outbursts finally lead the Martians to their hiding place despite the narrator resorting to violence in order to silence him, and knocking him out. While the narrator escapes detection by hiding in the coal-cellar, the clergyman's unconscious body is dragged away.
The Martians eventually depart from the scene. The Narrator leaves the destroyed building and heads towards Central London. En route, he once again encounters the artilleryman who entertains grandiose plans to rebuild civilisation underground, but the artilleryman's quixotic nature is shown by the slow progress of an unimpressive trench he has been digging. Abandoning the artilleryman to his delusions, the narrator heads into a deserted London and finally decides to give up his life by rushing towards the Martians, only to discover they, along with the Red Weed, have succumbed to terrestrial pathogenic bacteria, to which they have no immunity. He discovers the Martians dead in their camp at the peak of Primrose Hill, near Regent's Park in North London, and realises the invading force is no longer a threat. At the conclusion, society begins to return to normal and the narrator returns to his home to find himself unexpectedly reunited with his wife, who had thought him dead and vice versa.
The War of the Worlds is written in a journalistic style, as if a factual account of the invasion, which helps to make the story reasonable. The chapter headings are also similar to newspaper headlines. The narrator is a middle class scientific journalist living in Woking, south west of London, characteristics which make him very similar to Wells himself at the time of writing. The Narrator describes most of the events from first hand observation, often with precise and scientific detail, but also reports events later told to him by his younger brother, to provide a wider perspective on the invasion. The narrator, his wife, and his brother are not named; neither are the key characters of the artilleryman and the curate. While The War of the Worlds is a work of science fiction, much of its setting and premise was grounded in scientific ideas of the time, actual locations in Southern England and aspects of Wells's everyday life in the 1890s. Wells trained as a science teacher during the latter half of the 1880s. One of his teachers was T. H. Huxley, famous as a major advocate of Darwinism. He later taught science, and his first book was a biology textbook. He joined the scientific journal Nature as a reviewer in 1894. Much of his work is notable for making contemporary ideas of science and technology easily understandable to readers.
The plot has been related to invasion literature of the time. The novel has been variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British imperialism, and generally Victorian fears and prejudices. At the time of publication it was classified as a scientific romance, like his earlier novel The Time Machine. Since then, it has influenced much literature and other media, spawning half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, various comic book adaptations, a television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It also influenced the real-life work of scientists, notably the rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard.
The narrator (who is never named) is at an observatory in Ottershaw when explosions are seen on Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Later a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, southwest of London, near the narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is a space-going artificial cylinder. When the cylinder opens, the Martians (bulky, octopus-like creatures the size of a bear) briefly emerge, show difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere, and rapidly retreat into the cylinder, although a man who falls into the pit is apparently pulled in. A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) moves towards the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them with a heat-ray weapon, before beginning to assemble alien machinery.
After the attack, the narrator takes his wife to Leatherhead to stay with relatives until the threat is eliminated. The army has meanwhile set up guns, although the firing stops later. Upon returning home, he discovers the Martians have assembled towering three-legged "fighting-machines" (Tripods), each armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the so-called "black smoke". These Tripods easily defeat army units positioned around the crater and proceed to attack surrounding communities. Fleeing the scene, the narrator meets a retreating artilleryman, who tells him that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, cutting the narrator off from his wife. The two men try to escape together via Byfleet, but are separated at the Shepperton to Weybridge Ferry during a Martian attack on Shepperton. One of the Martian fighting machines is brought down in the River Thames by British artillery, causing its hot heat-ray equipment to almost boil the water as the narrator and countless others try to cross the river into Middlesex, while the Martians escape.
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The Martians eventually depart from the scene. The Narrator leaves the destroyed building and heads towards Central London. En route, he once again encounters the artilleryman who entertains grandiose plans to rebuild civilisation underground, but the artilleryman's quixotic nature is shown by the slow progress of an unimpressive trench he has been digging. Abandoning the artilleryman to his delusions, the narrator heads into a deserted London and finally decides to give up his life by rushing towards the Martians, only to discover they, along with the Red Weed, have succumbed to terrestrial pathogenic bacteria, to which they have no immunity. He discovers the Martians dead in their camp at the peak of Primrose Hill, near Regent's Park in North London, and realises the invading force is no longer a threat. At the conclusion, society begins to return to normal and the narrator returns to his home to find himself unexpectedly reunited with his wife, who had thought him dead and vice versa.
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