The War of the Worlds
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Copyright
William Collins
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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2017
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Silvia Crompton asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
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Source ISBN: 9780008190019
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008190026
Version: 2017-01-05
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
History of William Collins
Life & Times
Dedication
Book One—The Coming of the Martians
1. The Eve of the War
2. The Falling Star
3. On Horsell Common
4. The Cylinder Unscrews
5. The Heat Ray
6. The Heat Ray in the Chobham Road
7. How I Reached Home
8. Friday Night
9. The Fighting Begins
10. In the Storm
11. At the Window
12. What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton
13. How I Fell in with the Curate
14. In London
15. What Happened in Surrey
16. The Exodus from London
17. The “Thunder Child”
Book Two—Earth Under the Martians
1. Under Foot
2. What We Saw from the Ruined House
3. The Days of Imprisonment
4. The Death of the Curate
5. The Stillness
6. The Work of Fifteen Days
7. The Man on Putney Hill
8. Dead London
9. Wreckage
10. The Epilogue
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
History of William Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time.
A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
About the Author
When we think of H. G. Wells, we think of ground-breaking science fiction, alien life forms, prophetic man-made contraptions and intergalactic warfare. His was a mind capable not only of imagining things that were literally out of this world, but also of prophesying how mankind’s flaws might turn these apocalyptic visions into everyday reality. Most remarkable of all, it was a mind that had grown from notably ordinary beginnings.
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in the London suburb of Bromley, where his father, a part-time professional cricketer, owned an unsuccessful sporting-goods shop. The family struggled financially, particularly after a leg injury terminated Wells’ father’s cricketing career, and at the age of fourteen Herbert had to leave school in order to earn his keep.
For four years, Wells moved from one fruitless apprenticeship to the next, before being offered the lifeline of a return to education. He had developed a love of literature during his youth, but now, thanks to a scholarship to the Royal College of Science in London, he was able to indulge his other passion: biology. One of his teachers there was the eminent anatomist T. H. Huxley, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his outspoken support for Charles Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution. (Perhaps coincidentally, Huxley’s grandson Aldous would also go on to become an acclaimed science-fiction writer.)
Interesting Times
Alongside Huxley’s influence, Wells developed an interest in divisive topics as a member of the student debating society. And, without doubt, he was living in interesting times. By the 1880s, the notorious rigidity of Victorian society was giving way to contentious questions about evolution, religion and equality, and Wells soon became an outspoken critic of the social status quo. He felt society could be better and stronger – essentially, more evolved. He took an early interest in the newly established Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that was subsequently instrumental in founding the British Labour Party, and which included among its members satirical dramatist G. B. Shaw and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Wells fell out very publicly with the Fabians, accusing them of being an ineffectual ‘drawing-room society’ with ‘scattered members’. He wanted them to take a more gung-ho attitude to social reform, and thereby to rally new members to the cause. They in turn were embarrassed by his unconventional private life: he was twice-married and promiscuous, and had both legitimate and illegitimate children. Wells ultimately left the group in frustration, but in the meantime his mind had been awoken to the possibility that life on earth could quite easily become either immeasurably better or immeasurably worse, visions he elaborated upon in his fictional output during these early years of his political engagement.
Scientific Romance
H. G. Wells’ first book was his 1893 Textbook of Biology, which drew on his time as a science teacher, but just two years later he produced a debut novel that made him a household name and popularised a whole new genre of fiction. The Time Machine (1895) is the story of a scientist who travels to the very distant future, where he discovers that the division between rich and poor that was entrenched in nineteenth-century society has led to mankind splitting into two distinct species. The novel was a thinly veiled warning based on Wells’ political views, but its remarkable claim to fame is that it popularised the concept of ‘time travel’ by ‘time machine’: both terms coined by Wells, and now considered staples of science fiction.
Nineteenth-century literature, propelled in part by the swift technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, had seen a gradual shift from Gothic horror – with its ghost stories and vampires – to novels that dealt with man-made futuristic inventions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is now considered an early work of science fiction, but the genre came into its own in 1864 with the publication of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Verne dominated the genre for the next two decades, but the 1890s belong firmly to H. G. Wells. Following his success with The Time Machine, Wells published, in quick succession, bestsellers including The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Both he and Jules Verne have subsequently been declared ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, even if, in their day, the genre was more commonly known as scientific romance.
Wells’ novels of the 1890s pushed the boundaries of scientific imagination, making fantastical notions such as genetic engineering, invisibility and extraterrestrial life forms seem alarmingly real. The War of the Worlds boasts some of the earliest fictional ‘Martians’ and describes the as-yet-uninvented laser, cornerstones too of modern science fiction. But beneath the surface, these novels continued to present nightmarish visions of a future defined by selfishness, inequality and conflict: qualities Wells hoped humankind might yet do away with.
The War of the Worlds
A novel that launched a thousand books, comics and Hollywood movies, The War of the Worlds tells the ultimate science fiction story: super-intelligent and technologically advanced Martians land on Earth and set about taking over the planet, leaving mankind struggling to survive. As he did so often to great effect, Wells imbued his dystopian fantasy with a chilling air of realism: these aliens land, without fanfare, in the middle of suburban England. Inspiring intrigue more than alarm at first, they soon begin their swift advance through the suburbs towards London.
Wells’ Martians are monstrous: pulsating masses the size of a bear, greyish and slathering with long grasping tentacles. They travel across England in fearsome Tripods – fighting machines – out of which they fire powerful laser-like Heat-Rays. The humans are helpless against the Martians, but the Martians succumb, in the end, to simple Earthbound ‘germs of disease’ against which they have no immunity. A lucky escape for mankind, this time …
The War of the Worlds was published in 1898 and purported to recount, in hindsight, ‘the great disillusionment’ that occurred at the dawn of the twentieth century. The publication was timely: Queen Victoria’s life, and with it the Victorian era itself, was drawing to a close, and the beginning of the end of the mighty British Empire was in sight. Britain had profited for centuries from rampant colonialism, but what would the next era bring – and from where?
The bestselling novel achieved real cult status on Halloween weekend 1938, forty years after its publication, when a dramatic radio adaptation was broadcast in the United States. In a series of increasingly grim-sounding news bulletins, the nation was informed that a Martian invasion was underway in New Jersey. Many listeners who had missed the programme’s introduction were thrown into a panic that led to mass hysteria in the press – but the publicity made the name of the broadcast’s previously unknown director, Orson Welles.
Paradise Lost
For all the dystopian horror of his most famous novels, Wells was, in his predictions for mankind’s future, an optimist – initially, at least. He felt at heart that humanity was on the brink of something wonderful. His 1901 work Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought set out a vision of the future in which warfare was obsolete, nations having synthesised into large peaceful blocs that treated one another with ‘intelligent sympathy’. He predicted that, by the end of the twentieth century, this social revolution would have forever assured ‘the final peace of the world’.
The First World War shook his belief, although Wells remained convinced that the reality of all-out warfare might yet sober mankind into long-term peace. In his Outline of History (1920), he defined human history as ‘more and more a race between education and catastrophe’, but predicted that progress would prevail, be it ‘clumsily or smoothly’.
By the outbreak of the Second World War – which he had predicted with eerie accuracy in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come – Wells was less optimistic. It is apt that his final work, composed in 1945 and foreseeing the collapse and destruction of humanity, was entitled Mind at the End of Its Tether. He felt he had given ample warnings that had gone unheeded. Indeed, reflecting in 1941 on predictions he had made that had come horribly true, Wells suggested that his epitaph should simply read: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’ When the end came, in 1946, his ashes were scattered at sea.
Dedication
To my brother,
Frank Wells
this rendering of his idea.
CHAPTER 1
The Eve of the War
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. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”
A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.
In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin’s head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.
As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us—more than forty millions of miles of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.