Shortly after they arrived the Narrator had to go back to Woking to return the cart that he had borrowed from an innkeeper as promised. When the Fighting Machines begin to advance the Narrator runs home to get his wife to her cousins in Leatherhead. The Narrator had been anxious to know about the first cylinder because he was intrigued by it but when the second cylinder fell he was far more wary though he still believed that they couldn't overcome Earth's gravity. They open fire on the civilians with a Heat-Ray killing many including a delegation led by Ogilvy, while the others along with the narrator fled for their lives. The Martians emerged and they were revealed to be 'at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous'. The narrator and other locals gathered around the crater the cylinder had made, expecting to see men much like themselves crawl out of the opening that was slowly unscrewing itself. When the Martian cylinders landed near Woking in England, an astronomer named Ogilvy went to investigate and upon finding the crash site, the news spread like wildfire. The planet Mars had grown uninhabitable and so the Martians moved to claim Earth and wipe out the human race. One of the first observations the journalist narrator makes on encountering the creature that has emerged from the alien cylinder in, er, Surrey, is to note rather starchily 'the absence of a chin'.The War of the Worlds is an early science-fiction novel written by H.G.

Even the language, at times, is remarkably matter of fact. There is no pulsating final battle, in which a winner is garlanded with the spoils of victory, because the defeated species falls via much more prosaic means. Perhaps that's because there's no hero character a la Dan Dare or Buck Rogers to grab the attention in Wells's battle of civilisations – barely anyone, indeed, has a name. I t's a quirk of literary history that HG Wells's genre-defining tale of Martian invasion is probably more famous for its adaptations – the Orson Welles radio play that supposedly tricked America into believing they were genuinely under attack from Martians, the films, television series, even Jeff Wayne's double album and live tour – than the groundbreaking original, first published in serial format in Pearson's Magazine in 1897.

Herbert wells war of the worlds