The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells (fun to read .TXT) 📗

The War of the Worlds

By H. G. Wells.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Dedication Epigraph The War of the Worlds Book I: The Coming of the Martians I: The Eve of the War II: The Falling Star III: On Horsell Common IV: The Cylinder Opens V: The Heat-Ray VI: The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road VII: How I Reached Home VIII: Friday Night IX: The Fighting Begins X: In the Storm XI: At the Window XII: What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton XIII: How I Fell in with the Curate XIV: In London XV: What Had Happened in Surrey XVI: The Exodus from London XVII: The Thunder Child Book II: The Earth Under the Martians I: Under Foot II: What We Saw from the Ruined House III: The Days of Imprisonment IV: The Death of the Curate V: The Stillness VI: The Work of Fifteen Days VII: The Man on Putney Hill VIII: Dead London IX: Wreckage X: The Epilogue Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

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To
my brother
Frank Wells,
this rendering of his idea.

But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?⁠ ⁠… Are we or they Lords of the World?⁠ ⁠… And how are all things made for man?

Kepler, quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy The War of the Worlds Book I The Coming of the Martians I 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